Motorola has been in the doldrums recently, but the company is doing its best to raise its game, and the Android platform is helping it along nicely. The Milestone is the first handset to come to the UK running Android 2.0, and that alone is enough to push the Milestone into the limelight.

Add in the slide-out keyboard and some useful software features like support for Microsoft Exchange and Google Voice Search (which lets you do a Google search by speaking your search terms and which worked well for us about half the time), and on paper at least, Motorola has a winner here.

The general specifications are impressive with HSDPA, Wi-Fi and aGPS among the leading lights. The Milestone supports microSD cards and Motorola provides an 8GB card which ought to mean there is plenty of data storage available. The annoyance here is that the card slot lies beneath the battery, so hot-swapping is out of the question.

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Motorola provides a 60-day trial of its Motonav navigation software. We aren't convinced it is worth stumping up for after the trial period is over, but it is nice to play around with in the early days of ownership.

The on-board Web browser is well implemented and we like the pinch-to-zoom features. The processor is capable, and when Web browsing, as when using other apps, the screen flips quickly between wide and tall modes as you turn the Milestone in your hand. The camera's dual LED flash helps it out in low light conditions, but you need to be close to the subject for this to really be effective, and on the whole images are a little washed out.

So far, so reasonable, but what lets this handset down is its general hardware design and that slide-out keyboard. The hardware design is blocky and uninspiring, so that the Milestone feels like a bit of a brick in the hand. There are metal elements to the casing, which help it feel solid but also contribute to the 165g of weight. And overall the Milestone is a little large at 115.8 x 60 x 13.7mm.

Most annoying of all, though, on the design side, is the lip that sticks out below the screen. It is there because the bottom, keyboard-equipped section of this device is taller than the top, screen-equipped section.

Its presence is doubly annoying as Motorola seems to have designed the keyboard section poorly. Rather than use the extra width to allow for large keys, Motorola has placed a D-pad on the right side of the keypad area. The keys themselves are small, and for some reason Motorola has left two key spaces to the left and right of the space bar completely unused. We'd have liked shortcut keys to features on these, maybe even user definable shortcuts.

At least that overall device size allows for a large screen. At 3.7 inches it is ideal for Web browsing and its 480 x 854 pixels deliver top-notch viewing. If only it didn't attract fingerprints quite so much.

The Motorola Milestone has a superb screen and it is nice to see Android 2.0 make an appearance. But the slide-out keyboard, which should be a star feature, is disappointing and a real lost opportunity for Motorola.