Motorola Milestone to hit UK 7 December without Google Maps Navigation

Motorola has finally broken its silence and officially announced that the Milestone will be exclusively available from Expansys.com for £450 (SIM-free) from 7th December.

The greatly anticipated smartphone heralds the arrival of Android 2.0, but one of its key features – Google Maps Navigation – won’t be available from launch, being replaced by Motorola’s own turn-by-turn Motonav software.

This is because Google’s free turn-by-turn software, which is still in beta, is currently only available in the US. Shame, but Motonav – as seen on Motorola’s dedicated sat-navs in the US – will hopefully soften the blow.

One advantage the UK Milestone will have over its US counterpart, the Droid, is full multi-touch web browsing, including those increasingly widepsread ‘pinch to zoom’ gestures. The rest of the spec will also be identical, which means a lovely 3.7in screen, 8GB storage, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a web browser with Flash support for sites like YouTube.

Three cheers for the pre-Christmas Milestone, then – we’ll have a full review very soon.