Motorola Milestone XT720 review

The latest version of the Motorola Milestone, the XT720, is radically different from the original. It lacks the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but improves the camera’s sensor from 5- to 8-megapixels and adds a Xenon flash. Without the keyboard, it’s much thinner, but it still retains the chunky design and weighs the same. It also has the same 550MHz processor and runs Android 2.1, which supports multiple accounts, Microsoft Exchange and HTML5.

One of the main selling points of the XT720 is its 720p video capture capability (hence the name), but sadly it’s very disappointing. For a start, you don’t get an 8GB microSD card in the box as with the original Milestone, so if you want to shoot video for any length of time you’ll need to invest in at least a 4GB card. Captured video is also poor, suffering from banding and noise, especially indoors, and the camera doesn’t handle movement very well.

However the camera performs remarkably well for a phone camera and, in good light, it produces pleasing images. Photos are a little over-exposed, though, and not as sharp as they could be due to aggressive noise reduction. Chromatic aberrations are also a problem on high-contrast edges. In poorer lighting conditions, the camera struggles – there’s a lot of colour shifting and chroma noise. The flash is adequate for snapshots while you’re out and about, but it’s not powerful enough to light distant subjects.