Motorola Defy review

Daft names clearly aren’t the preserve of desktop PC manufacturers, a fact proved by Motorola’s latest handset. Ignore the moniker, however, and you’ll find a gem of a smartphone underneath. Motorola’s latest device sports a lovely 3.7in, 480 x 854 capacitive screen (a higher resolution than the giant HTC Desire HD no less), and squeezes in a lot more besides.

If that screen doesn’t catch your eye, then the unusual design certainly will. With its exposed screwheads and grippy, light-plastic chassis, the Defy looks more like a rugged GPS than a modern smartphone. But it isn’t just for looks.

Motorola claims the Defy is water, dust and scratch resistant, and it even sports an IP67 rating to prove it’s been tested against dust and moisture ingress.

It certainly feels sturdy. The screen, just like the iPhone 4, is protected with impact- and scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass, there’s plenty of protection around the sides, flaps to prevent the audio and USB ports getting clogged with dust and dirt, plus a thin rubber seal around the perimeter of the battery compartment. It’s nice to see a manufacturer focus not just on glitz and glamour, but on practicality for once.

Elsewhere, you’ll find Android 2.1 in place, with a 2.2 update in the pipeline for early 2011, but performance is still decent. The Defy’s 800MHz processor is a little down on the class-leaders, most of which sport 1GHz CPUs, but a BBC homepage load time of 13 seconds and a SunSpider JavaSript score of 16 seconds is far from slow.