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.

Likewise, we found general responsiveness in and around the operating system very good, although again not quite up there with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S, Desire HD or iPhone 4. While sweeping from home screen to home screen, and whizzing through long lists, the Defy occasionally felt hesitant.

With Motorola’s Motoblur Android customisations in place, however, we’re willing to forgive these small annoyances. Motoblur is excellent, bringing together a host of social network, email and photo sharing services under one roof, grouping together contacts and contact images, updates, feeds and more.

It lets you post to many services simultaneously, and the resizable Motoblur widgets for the Android desktop are very slick indeed. But it’s the sheer number of services it can sync with that’s the big attraction: not just Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, but also MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Last.FM, Picasa, Flickr and more.

And the rest of the specifications aren’t bad either: the Deft has a decent 5-megapixel camera with a single LED flash that produces sharp, clean shots; it has good battery life, with an admirable 60% left on the meter after our 24-hour test (on a par with the iPhone 4 and HTC Desire); and Motorola has also thrown in the Swype text-entry system, a welcome bonus that speeds up typing no end. The only complaint we have over the Defy’s list of capabilities is that it doesn’t shoot HD video, just DVD-ish resolution, at 720 x 480.

Apart from that, though, the Defy is an excellent phone. The slightly rugged design is pleasingly different. It has good battery life, a lovely screen and a decent complement of software. If social networking is your thing, you’ll love it. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is the price: it’s only just hit the shops, but the Defy is already edging toward budget smartphone territory, with free handset tariffs starting at £20 per month. And that makes it an excellent buy.

Related Posts

Samsung Galaxy S7 Review: A Great Phone in its Day, but Don’t Buy One Private Internet Access Review How to Change or Set Your Profile Picture in Zoom How to Share Your Spotify Playlist How to Check Your Instagram Messages How To Create a Cartoon Avatar from a Photo Gif Not Working in Instagram – What to Do Pluto TV Review—Is It Worth It? ExpressVPN Review – Unbiased and Tested In-House