Phorm's Site

Well, after running for over a year with the iPhone, I recently switched to a Motorola Milestone as my primary cellphone. Overall, I'm fairly happy with the phone, and I suppose this could be considered a "review" of it and a comparison against the previous phone (iPhone 3G).
My incarnation of the Milestone does have some drawbacks. It was ordered online, and is the European model. As such, it doesn't seem to do 3G in North America, and I had to manually program the APN (Data Network) settings. My understanding is that the models to be released domestically will support 3G, but the European models don't support the odd frequencies that we have here in North America. I've heard rumor that the N. American version may not support Multi-touch (two fingers to pinch the screen for zooming, etc) due to Patent issues, but I cannot confirm that. It does work on my version of the phone though.
Overall, I'm going to discount the 2G issue. I was aware of it when I got the phone, it probably won't apply to a domestic model, and I don't use it anyways (little to no 2G network where I life now, and it sucks more battery).
General Stuff

• Jailbreaking: Initially I had some issues Jailbreaking my phone (and just to be clear, it is MY phone, bought with cold, hard cash and not coming from my network provider or attached to some weird contract, etc). It seems that Motorola changed the flash procedure between the Droid and Milestone (hold VolumeUp+Camera at boot) and that the Droid hacks won't work. There's a lot of grousing online about this as Droid users give out the usual "you're so dumb for not being able to follow instructions to jailbreak your phone" crap, but the fact is that the Droid method and patches DO NOT work on the Milestone.

  Once I found the right one for the Milestone though, it happily opened up for me. The nice part is that if an app wants root, it STILL needs me to allow it when it tries privilege escalation.

Some of the advantages of the Milestone over the iPhone are:

• keyboard: The physical keyboard slides out in landscape mode, giving you a physical QWERTY interface to use. Sadly, here is no numberic row, so using numbers requires use of an "ALT" key.
  It's very nice to have a physical keyboard, though I daresay that it isn't quite as good as my work Blackberry. The BB has nicely raised keys that are well seperated, and a numeric key row (unfortunately this would not likely have fit with the slide-out keyboard theme on the Milestone).

  I would have expected the virtual keyboard to be less useful, but in fact it seems to be more accurate than the one on my iPhone. The completion options that scroll above the keyboard are also very nice.
   

• Battery: The battery is removable/replaceable, and seems to get better life than my iPhone did. Being able to actually remove the battery is great if you want something that will work into the future, or you like to keep a spare around for swapping out on long trips, etc. It's also handy if the phone does something funky and you want a "hard" poweroff.
   
• Storage: You can consider this a plus or a minus, but the Milestone uses mini-SDHC (up to 32GB) cards for storage rather than relying on oodles of internal memory. Swapping cards may be an annoyance if you've got pictures/ringtones/app-data stored on the card, but it also lets you use different cards for different purposes and/or upgrade to bigger cards. You must remove the battery to swap the SD card or the SIM card.
   
• Hi-Resolution Screen: The screen on the milestone is a hidden gem, as it has a resolution of 854x480. If you've got good eyes, then browsings sites with a lot of information (slashdot, for example) requires a whole lot less pinching, scrolling, or zooming.
  One thing I do find slightly annoying though is that you sometimes need to zoom in order to use web forms etc without pressing the wrong button. This can be quite annoying on facebook as the "Send Message" button is rather close to the "Logout" link.
   
• Browser: The browser on the droid is excellent. I've yet to find a page it won't render properly, including the oft-rendered slashdot. It is listed on many sites as being "Flash 10 ready" but I fail to see as of yet how to enable flash support (which could be good or bad given banner-ad issues). It does seem to handle JavaScript well enough.
   
• Google "integration": As the Droid OS is something of a google brainstorm, some integration with google apps was expected. You get the usual (search, maps /w GPS, etc), but what I wasn't expecting is the sync with gmail accounts.
  • Contacts: All your contacts will sync with an attached gmail account, meaning you get everything including  phone #'s, pictures, email addresses, etc. This is a bit annoying the first time around if you have a bunch of "junk" emails in your address book, but afterword it's quite nice as all your phone data is backed up in the "cloud" with your gmail account, and new gmail contacts end up on your phone. You can use it with a personal gmail domain as well. Overall it seems quite similar to how Blackberries share data via BIS or BES.
     
  • Calendar: The calendars also sync to your google/gmail accounts, meaning that items on the phone will display on your google account and vise-versa. I haven't used this much yet so I'm not sure if you can have public vs private calendar events.
     
  • Email: Once your phone is tagged to a gmail account, you get notified almost instantly when an email comes into that account. There's no need to poll accounts every X minutes for new email.
     
• Syncing: Syncing data from an older phone or outlook, etc is irritating, as the phone does not directly support outlook even through the software installed on a PC. The best way to handle contact imports seems to be to sync outlook to a google account, and then the phone to google. This was actually quite an annoyance in the beginning.
   
• Music: There are two good points I've found here. One is that you can simply drag+drop files onto a USB-connected phone as if it were a standard mass-storage device. It will catalog dropped Mp3's or M4a's with the Artist, Album, Title, etc and allows you to search appropriately. The music player is quite nice, and supports A2DP for bluetooth streaming, etc.

  The Motorola desktop software will ALSO sync with music from playlists in your iTunes account, allowing you to use M4A's on your phone. The odd point of this though is that I can't find where it stores these songs on the card itself as of yet.

  I consider the ability to drag/drop music without iTunes or a special application a fairly big plus, as I'm a strong Linux user and there is no good iTunes alternative on 'nix.
   

• Ringtones: You can use one of the songs in your Music folder as an overall ringtone. You can also put songs (mp3's seem to work, M4A's don't for me) in your "Ringtones" folder to use them for other stuff like alarms, per-contact rings, etc
   
• Background apps: The Milestone allows you to run downloaded apps in the background, unlike the iPhone which restricts this to only Apple's apps (iTunes, AppStore, iPhone media player) unless you have a Jailbroken phone.

 
So where does the Droid still lag behind the iPhone:

• Cohesion/compatibility: I've heard a lot of stories about different phones using AndroidOS having a much different experience. The milestone seems quite nice as it is a newer phone, but others may have stability issues due to hardware differences, and when a newer phone comes out some of the DroidOS features may not end up working on the milestone.
   
• iTunes: You can sync your songs from iTunes using a PC and USB cable. However, one thing that was nice about the iPhone was that you could also connect to iTunes via the built-in App (OS version 3+) and download via wifi/2G/3G without needing a PC.
   
• App Store: The "Droid Market" doesn't seem quite as well structured as the app store. One nice thing about it is that it will tell you all the things an App can do to your phone (access the contacts list, make calls, keep phone awake, etc), but the bad part is that it's hard to find good apps. I have some excellent SIP (voice over IP) applications for my iPhone. The same company apparently makes one for Droid-based phones but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well as the one on the iPhone, and the alternative sipDroid seems mainly based around a PBX provider who wants to sell their service (doesn't work well with my SIP account).

  There may be light on the horizon though, as I did speak with the creator of the "siphon" SIP application and he's looking at porting it to the Droid soon.

Overall, I've found that my Milestone makes a good phone, a very nice smartphone, and a decent music player.

The iPhone makes a darn good music player if you use iTunes, a decent smartphone, and is not so great at being a phone due to battery-life issues, etc.
So the Milestone has a permanent place on my belt-clip, and the iPhone can ride side-saddle in my bag for when I listen to music or need to use my VOIP/SIP account when Wifi is in range.