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The Motorola Droid will be called the Milestone in Europe. The Droid is exciting techheads’ trousers in the US as one of the first handsets to be specifically designed for Android 2.0.
The headline-grabbing feature of Google’s next mobile OS update is turn-by-turn sat-nav. The official Milestone page, however, notes that Google Maps and Motonav are network-dependent features and may not be available in certain areas. We’ve contacted Motorola, but the company is yet to let us know whether the UK will miss out on the sat-nav. We think it’s unlikely: such an ommission would turn this Milestone into a millstone pretty sharpish.
The Milestone is a Qwerty slider with a 94mm (3.7-inch) touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. Optional extras include the Milestone Multimedia Station dock to see the phone function as a picture frame and alarm clock.
German Android blog AndroidPIT claims das Milestone will arrive on O2 as soon as 9 October, for somewhere in the autobahn of €480.
Most handsets are currently on Android 1.6, codenamed Donut. The software developer kit is available for Android 2.0, codenamed Eclair. In other Android news, Google has denied rumours it’s working on its own Android handset.
Update: Motorola has confirmed that the Milestone won’t have Google Maps Navigation — instead it’ll ship with its own sat-nav app, Motonav, which is only free for 60 days. But the good news is that it will support multi-touch, so we can pinch to zoom. There’s no date on when the Milestone will arrive in the UK, but it’ll be some time after mid-November, when Italy and Germany get it.
