My review of the Motorola Milestone, which appeared in Telecom’s co. magazine.

I have a perfectly good mobile phone. It texts, it emails, it takes photos. I can even ring people. But when I was offered the use of Telecom’s whizzo new Motorola Milestone, running Google’s Android operating system that’s knocked sliced bread off its ‘greatest thing’ perch, I was keen, real keen.

I was out to lunch (so to speak) recently with our Online Response Team, and listened as the guys debated the philosophical and technological differences between the iPhone and Android. Basically, the iPhone is like Steve Job’s famous black turtleneck – warm and comforting, but slightly restrictive, while Android is like a Che Guevara tee-shirt: hip and revolutionary.

But first, a disclaimer: if you want to know how many megarings a phone can omni-vate per quasi-spagbot, read Pat Pilcher on the page opposite. But if you want to know how a grown man can get sucked into farting about on a smartphone when he’s supposed to be supervising his two year old son in the bath, that’s where my tech analysis strengths lie.

I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening swearing loudly at mobile phone manuals, but Android denied me this cathartic pleasure (don’t worry, team, I took my latent anger out on a missing remote control later) by setting up my contacts, email, my gmail accounts and twitter in about ten minutes flat. I was impressed.

The first thing that stuck me was this phone is FAST – the Milestone takes full advantage of XT’s HSPA+ upgrade, so there’s minimal waiting about while your email downloads. You push a button, stuff happens. Easy.
Then, I had a saunter through the Android Market, where you buy ‘apps’ or applications – I chose a Flickr photography app, a few games for the bus and the Kindle e-reader. There’s loads to choose from, and I could see myself loading up like a Harrods boxing day sale.

The web browser was a revelation, working like computer browser you ‘zoom into’ with your fingers to make the text bigger and readable. On Saturday, me and my partner spent twenty minutes or so on the couch surfing websites on the phone – not having to get up and ‘go use the computer’ to use the internet was cool. This was doing stuff together, and it was nice.

Did the Milestone make me more productive? I’ll say yes. Did it make me more popular? I’ll say no. Despite its bulk, weight, a slide out keyboard I found a bit superfluous and voice performance that’s a little… crackly, I thoroughly enjoyed using Android and the Milestone. You’d love it too – take it from a guy that knows next to nothing about phones.

Fontcapture makes an honest to goodness font out of your handwriting. It’s actually quite a weird feeling to see a whole page of your writing you didn’t write.

Gizmodo has a kind of silly article about Steve Jobs’ house.

I prefer to think of it like this, sat on the floor with just a lamp and a kick arse stereo.

Three and a half years ago I bought one of my most favorite gadgets ever – my first iPod. 4th generation, 20GB, that vanilla white.

We had a lot of fun together. The iTrip meant I could play it over any radio, and when I changed cars, the new stereo had a cable to plug it in directly. It got some larfs on the TUANZ blog. I loved it so I replaced the hard drive and then the battery, scoffing at the next gen photo and video-capable iPods. My greyscreen, text only iPod did all I needed and wanted it to – play music.

The beginning of the end was a simple numbers game – I have about 55GB of music, which doesn’t go into a 20GB iPod. Shuffling music became a pain – what if I NEEDED to hear Don’t Stop Believing and it wasn’t loaded? You can see my dilemma.

Then came a music format re-think. I had about 200 CDs, only 15-20 of which we actually listen to. All other music came courtesy of iPods through the line in. All those CDs are burned to MP3 and in iTunes, so what do I need those bulky cases taking up space for, right? So it was off to Real Groovy with a big box and a funny feeling, trading in all those years of collecting for cash (it took great willpower and cool reminder of the point of the exercise to not take the higher ‘trade’ offer).

So those CDs and a little extra turned into a 5th Generation, 120GB iPod Classic (Grey. They don’t do white in these). It’s my #3 music collection backup, after the Mac and external hard drive. It does a few more cool things old Whitey wasn’t built for, like storing and showing all my photos, and playing video, through the TV, even (if a little grainy). I don’t LOVE it as much as iPod #1, OK it’s smaller, but its edges seem unnecessarily sharp, and the click wheel is taking some getting used to. It also cavalierly created a new time sucking task irresistible to the obsessive/compulsive music fan – collecting album art. Ta.

Still, I like it. A lot, lack of firewire syncing aside. If and when I get me mitts on an iPhone, the new iPod will essentially become a backup hard drive with bells on. Old faithful is out to pasture, sitting faithfully, loaded with an OSX emergency startup disc, and a bit of music ready to call on when needed. It’s hard to say goodbye sometimes, eh.

I *did* get there in the end. Slept like a baby.

I think I have a new favorite building.

How to make hard drives even sexier than they already are.

It gave me immense pleasure to turn this abomination:

…into this:

Piles of cables annoy me out of all proportion.

Ahahahahah. Just look.