Motorola MILESTONE XT720 review: Android sidearm

Poor video player with limited XviD support

The video player itself is as simple and limited as it could possibly be.

The video player has much room for improvement

You just hit the video box in the gallery to get a list of all videos available on the phone. And the controls while playing a video boil down to play/pause, next and previous buttons, as well as a draggable progress bar.

The codec support is pretty limited with DivX and XviD nowhere to be seen, at least officially. We tried a few samples and we found the XT720 to handle XviD videos of up to WQVGA resolution and no longer than 10-20 minutes. Bigger files (both resolution and time) seem to need more processing power than MILESTONE XT720 can offer. Of course that can’t be entirely true since it plays its own HD videos captured with the camcorder. The only logical explanation is the lack of proper software support.

Music player could use an update

Sadly, the music player saw no updates in Android 2.0 and 2.1. Don’t get us wrong, the Motorola MILESTONE XT720 is not too bad at managing your audio files but there’s definitely room for improvement.

The MILESTONE XT720 music player app automatically sorts your music collection

The first screen of the music player has four large buttons, which cover the four ways to sort your music collection – by artist, album, song or by user-created playlists.

Albums in landscape view

The functionality of the music player hasn't changed much. It has that great feature that allows you to quickly look up a song in YouTube or Google search by holding down your finger on a song. What's even better, the YouTube search results are loaded Straight into the YouTube client.

The "Now playing screen"

Besides gradual typing for searching a specific song, there is an alphabet scroll which appears on the right side of the track list.

There are still some shortcomings of the music player that need addressing though. There are no equalizer presets, nor any alternative skins.

FM Radio on board

The Motorola MILESTONE XT720 is equipped with an FM radio with RDS. The interface is simple – there’s a tuning dial and you can save as many as 20 stations as favorites. You can also listen on the loudspeaker, but the headset is still needed.

The FM radio app

Audio output loud and clear

Motorola MILESTONE XT720 performed quite impressively in our audio quality test. It's one of the loudest handset we have seen and it also delivers nicely clean output with audio tracks sounding just the way they were meant to.

The frequency response is spot on with the greatest deviation being the 0.16 dB, a value only detectable in lab conditions. The noise level and stereo crosstalk readings are great and so are the distortion levels and the dynamic range.

Here come the detailed results:

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Motorola MILESTONE XT720	+0.16 -0.06	-86.0	81.0	0.014	0.054	-86.3
Motorola BACKFLIP	+0.11 -0.48	-63.1	63.4	0.042	0.165	-59.9
Motorola MILESTONE	+0.16 -0.06	-74.1	74.7	0.014	0.040	-73.1
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10	+0.07 -0.37	-85.4	85.3	0.018	0.068	-83.6
Google Nexus One	+0.19, -0.55	-86.1	85.8	0.023	0.088	-85.2
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S	+0.03 -0.04	-90.7	90.6	0.014	0.019	-90.6
Apple iPhone 4	+0.01, -0.07	-90.1	90.0	0.0068	0.012	-89.6
HTC HD2	+0.39, -2.99	-89.0	89.1	0.057	0.960	-87.5

Motorola MILESTONE XT720 vs Motorola BACKFLIP frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.