Milestone or Nexus One?

The Milestone keyboard is easy and fun to use - my opinion !

For me, the choice boils down to:

You want a physical keyboard = Milestone
You don't care about a physical keyboard = Nexus One / something else

I use my Milestone for email quite a bit and online form filling and I find the physical keyboard essential. I can type faster and with greater accuracy on the hard keyboard than the soft one, so I will not be buying any phone without a hard keyboard. I find the Milestone keyboard to be fine = it's not a laptop, but after a day or two it's not as bad as the reviews make out.

I agree that the choice boils down to the keyboard...do you want a real keyboard or is the soft keyboard good enough?

I bought a Milestone and I honestly love it. But, I didn't realize how nice the keyboard on the G1 was until I passed it on and bought the Milestone.

Some caveats about the keyboard:

1) The keys are all flat, makes it a little harder to type. The G1 has slightly rounded/domed keys and it really makes a difference for the positive. I don't know what phone you're coming from but if you have a really nice typing keyboard you'll probably "miss" it which may dampen the "Wow" factor of the Milestone.

2) There's no number row. People who type passwords with letters and numbers will quickly get used to using the soft keyboard to type them in.

3) My phone is a German model and I have a QUERTZ keyboard instead of QUERTY. I'm not sure what top row the English phones have. It took me about 5 days to get used to typing with the Y in the "wrong" spot. Now I can switch from the hard to soft keyboard and not even think about where "Y" should be on either.

Having said all that the phone is AWESOME. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. What I found for the first week or so was that I loved it but was swearing every time I opened the keyboard until I got used to hitting ALT twice for numbers and/or finding "y". Now I still love it, but I only use the keyboard for texting or other heavy typing. I use the soft keyboard for username/password entry.

So, almost a month later I get to LOVE my phone and be used to the keyboard. I guess that's the best you can say about it, you'll get used to it.

Gwen

I gave the Nexus One some thought. A friend at Google may make an invite available if they are not public in January. I also have a milestone. I could like both I guess . The milestone is a very nice phone but it needs an update. Some things don't work right and some of the buglets from the Droid are present on the Milestone. Just a few basic things to consider:

1) until recently we did not really know how the Milestone would get updated if you bought it from a place like expansys or amazon. Would motorola do OTA, would google update it, would you download a zip update? We believe from the user forum for milestone that motorola hosts, that it will be delivered truly OTA by servers that motorola will provide.

2) the bugs like camera auto-focus, issues with battery life, exchange issues with opening attachments are all present on the milestone. These should be addressed with the update. However, there will also be bugs with the Nexus One most likely. Bugs is bugs.

3) The physical keyboard is nice on the milestone. I'm coming from a Hero and I appreciate it. But I like HTC's stance so I use the Hero with a custom MoDaCo ROM on it since I can travel with it, run the market enabler, etc.

4) root on the milestone. I've seen root exploits already published for the Nexus One. The milestone root exploits may/may not work like the droid. Who knows? But one thing for certain. Travelers to India, Singapore, Hong Kong will need root to see paid or other apps on the market.

So, as far as choosing goes; I am going to choose both. This is my robotic year coming up...

The root on the Nexus is most likely not available on the public release version, since the phone that got rooted had an ENG SPL on it, with a special commando available.
With that said, HTC phones usually does get rooted and so I guess its very probable that the Nexus will get rooted to.

As for the Milestone in regards to root.
Its assumed that the exploit that worked on the Droid should work on the Milestone to, since the firmware was patched after the Droid got rooted.
And thereby the bug should be in the fw on your phone already, so as soon as a fw for the Milestone is released, it should be possible redo the Droid exploit on the Milestone.

I would like Milestone with physical keyboard.

Well, neither Droid or Nexus One support multitouch. Milestone does.

So, its not only about the keyboard. Its also about the multitouch.

I own Milestone and I am pretty happy with it, I have minor issues with it:
- Camera autofocus. Still waiting for 2.0.1 to get this fixed, in Brazil didn't get the OTA update yet.
- Unable to disable 3G. I found a workaround to disable internet so I don't run out of my internet plan, but it would be nice to have a switch 3G off option.

francofs said:

Well, neither Droid or Nexus One support multitouch. Milestone does.

So, its not only about the keyboard. Its also about the multitouch.

I own Milestone and I am pretty happy with it, I have minor issues with it:
- Camera autofocus. Still waiting for 2.0.1 to get this fixed, in Brazil didn't get the OTA update yet.
- Unable to disable 3G. I found a workaround to disable internet so I don't run out of my internet plan, but it would be nice to have a switch 3G off option.

Click to expand...

There is an app in the market called apndroid I believe that is a widget that can turn the mobile internet on and off. I use it with success on the milestone on ATT's edge network.

francofs said:

- Unable to disable 3G. I found a workaround to disable internet so I don't run out of my internet plan, but it would be nice to have a switch 3G off option.

Click to expand...

Have you tried this app?

APNdroid 2.0 Adds Automation to Android Battery Saving Tool - Android - Lifehacker

Have you tried this app?

APNdroid 2.0 Adds Automation to Android Battery Saving Tool - Android - Lifehacker

Click to expand...

Sweet, it actually does what I did as a workaround, I'll surely use it, it is faster than doing by hand and it has other nice features for battery saving too.

Thanks

I'm stuck between getting Milestone or Nexus too. The milestone ticks every box for me with the one exception of custom roms (root). This is the only thing that holds me back getting the milestone. Now if there was a larger "developers scene" for the milestone I'd jump! However it looks like all the developers are jumping on the Nexus wagon which means that handset will not go stale for the next few years

So do I choose with my heart and pick the "milestone" only to get bored with it in a few months.....

Or do I choose with my head and get a nexus one which I'll flash and re-flash for the next year or so.....

Hmmmmm.... Oh and I've got a overdue upgrade with vodafone Uk doing nothing at the moment which is not helping

Milestone and Nexus One use same OS (Android 2.0 & Android 2.1), so you shouldn't worry about applications, most of them should work on both, as Milestone will also get the Android 2.1 update.

Edit: Sorry, didn't get what you meant first. But I do beleive we will have root for Milestone too, its just too early to say