The rugged phone from Motorola

Saturday, Mar 05, 2011

Gulf News

Rating:

Dubai By way of looks, Motorola’s Defy certainly has the ruggedness to it, a trait not usually associated with Android smart phones. The Defy is water-, dust- and scratch-proof. I had a few attempts to scratch the Gorilla Glass screen with a pen and keys, but truth be said it didn’t yield much.

I even ran immersed it in a glass of water, yet the Defy seemed to deal well with the cold treatment. While the phone survived the water, the capacitive screen loses responsiveness while wet.

I also dropped the Defy deliberately on a few occasions in front of my colleagues. They were impressed.

I threw it down some stairs, and it survived the even such an extreme measure on my part.But none of the shock-proofing challenges had a negative effect on the design.

OK, it isn’t the prettiest handset out there, but its black chassis is no real surprise and the curved edges are nice enough. The long edges each sport three screws holding the shiny front plate to the matte rubberised back.

The top mounted headset connector and micro-USB port have rubberised covers to help prevent dust and dirt getting in.

The backplate is held down by a lock slider that helps ensure a snug fit. Both SIM and microSD card slots are under the battery.

With Android 2.1 on-board, the Defy is a little behind the times. The absence of Android 2.2 is a big minus.

The 3.7-inch model, moreover, is not a fast phone. It runs on a 800Mhz processor rather than 1GHz and is backed up by 512MB RAM.

But there are occasional signs of lag, though nothing too irritating. A pixel resolution of 480x854 puts it just slightly above the 480x800 of many of the leading smart phones in the market.

Streaming files

Motorola has skinned the basic Android experience and it certainly makes its presence felt. So, when you’re looking at the main apps list, there’s a certain familiarity, but also some customisation.

Motorola has added a lot of its own widgets. These give a real fillip to Android’s own offerings and enable you to do all kinds of things.

The Defy’s 5-megapixel camera is workmanlike if not exceptional, and offers auto-focus, flash, scene modes including macro, and a digital zoom operated by the volume rocker. Pictures are reasonably sharp, though I consistently found them a little on the dark side, even in good light.

The Defy has Wi-Fi, GPS and all the usual that not too long ago were once considered a premium experience. It also comes with Motorola’s cloud-based Motoblur service, which has a host of selling points.

But this feature is not available in the Middle East.

When it comes to entering text for any kind of messaging you’ve got the usual Qwerty keyboards in portrait and widescreen modes. It also offers Swype as an alternative to tapping individually at keys.

The DLNA app can stream multimedia files to DLNA-capable devices, like home theatre systems, gaming consoles and even other phones.

Video recording is 640x480-pixels, which isn’t bad, but noticeably down the scale from the Motorola Milestone’s.

The 2GB of memory on board can be boosted to 32GB. Battery life held up fairly well, giving about a day-and-a-half of moderate to heavy use.

Another plus is the pricing. Despite its semi-rugged and waterproof casing combined with a decent set of internal specs, it can be had for Dh1,799. A compelling reason on its own.

Motorola Defy: Water and dust proof

techreview

Pros

* Good screen

* Highly functional media player with connected features.

* Gorilla Glass screen

* Water-resistant

* Relatively long battery life

Cons

* Poorly located microSD card slot.

* Not enough on-board memory.

* Android 2.1