Motorola Milestone XT720 review

Well, this might be the bit you've been waiting for. The Motorola Milestone XT720 sports an 8-megapixel camera with xenon flash and 720p video recording.

These are just the headline features, and actually the camera has a good number of tweaks up its sleeve that put it on a par with some of the top notch camera phones.

There are several capture modes, for example, including self portrait and six-shot burst shooting. You can use face detection, a camera shake prevention mode and there's touch focus, so you can get the camera to focus on what you want rather than whatever's in the middle of the shot.

We didn't notice any shutter lag, and if we have a usability complaint, it's that the shooting button on the right edge of the chassis doesn't actually give a lot of tactile feedback when you're shooting a photo.

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DETAIL: This outdoor shot shows how well the camera grasps details. The conditions were quite dark and it managed to let quite a lot of light in to make this shot work

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WIDE ANGLE: The wide angle of the lens really comes into its own when there's a lot you want to capture. Here, at the full 8MP, we wanted to get a lot of the playground paraphernalia in shot, for example

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GOOD ZOOM: There's plenty of detail on this image of a bike, and you can zoom in quite a long way before the photo degrades beyond all usability. You won't get that with many camera phones

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CLOSE-UP: The macro mode is particularly impressive. Colour reproduction of this orchid is spot on, and the detail is magnificent

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INDOORS: Shooting indoors with the Xenon flash produced mixed results. Even Xenon isn't going to get you great photos when the subject is a little way away, but when fairly close in you can get pretty good shots. For once, the cat is reproduced in his true colour, and there's plenty of detail in this close-in shot too

Shooting 720p video was just like shooting video on any other phone. Hit the button, move the phone around. But there were some pauses while, we assume, the Motorola Milestone XT720 actually saved what it was shooting.

There were three pauses in our 30 second test video below and they show up on the video and the phone itself, so this is a problem that is more than just skin deep.

Shooting video at lower resolutions didn't produce this problem, but lower-res shooting isn't really what you're buying this handset for, right?

If you want to show your video shooting efforts on a TV, then you simply use the provided cable, which is mini-HDMI at the handset end, and full-sized HDMI for your TV.