Hands on: Motorola Milestone XT720 review

Those of you that thought the Flipout was the main release this month from the Moto bunch were wrong: check out the new Motorola Milestone XT720.

Featuring a high end 8MP camera with 720p HD video recording, it's the appearance of a phone we've seen rumoured for a very long time indeed.

It's essentially the Motorola Motoroi we showed you back in February at Mobile World Congress, but using a UK-friendly radio receiver and shedding the digital video tuner offered to the Koreans.

What's odd about the phone is that it's still packing the same hump on the right-hand side - we assumed that was to accommodate the TV antenna in the Motoroi, but it's still present in the Motorola Milestone XT720.

Still, it's a slim device, with 10.9mm thickness, which should help to make it more pocket friendly. This makes it as slim as the Samsung Wave, but it certainly feels a lot thicker than that phone when you hold it in the palm.

Compared to the original Milestone it's much thinner though, thanks to shedding the keyboard - although it's testament to Motorola's design team that the original Milestone isn't much thicker.

The phone sits well in the hand, and the presence of the 8MP camera with Xenon flash puts this phone at the head of the pack when it comes to photography.

The sample shots we saw on the Motorola Milestone XT720 were highly impressive - almost as good as you'll see from a DSLR when viewed on the Milestone XT720's screen, especially when looking close up.

As you can see, there's also an HDMI-out port to pump the content to your high definition TV, but when this was performed with the new phone the 720p video footage shot was a little poor in our eyes.

Despite apparently being 24fps cinematic quality HD, the picture was juddery (although high-res) so we're not sure that this is a proper competitor to standalone HD cameras.

We'd prefer it if phone manufacturers simply concentrated on making SD video better rather than focusing on headline specifications like 720p HD video recording, as the footage shown simply wasn't up to scratch at the launch - this may change in our full Motorola Milestone XT720 review though.

But overall the imaging quality seemed fantastic on the phone, with the snaps and sheer range of picture options on offer making this a much better Android camera than the incumbent snap-king, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.