Motorola DEFY review
Since the introduction of the iPhone the business of making smartphones has taken a singular direction: slim, large screened devices with plenty of power and an app catalogue that you could spend a day getting lost in.
They’re a boon if you commute and great if you want to waste a few minutes playing games or sharing photos, they even allow you to work on the go or do your grocery shopping, among (a million) other things.
But designers seldom spare a thought for the person who goes to work in a truck, rather than on a commuter train. They don’t seem to care for the man who wears toe-capped boots or the woman who spends her day watching unruly toddlers fling Ribena about.
Queue the Motorola Defy: Motorola’s Defy is an Android smartphone that you don’t have to worry about. Its raison d'être is to allow your digital world to travel with you, without you having to worry about slip cases, screen protectors or rubber bumpers. All being well you should be able to concentrate on doing your job, or having fun, without the worry of your exceptionally expensive smartphone buckling under the wear and tear.
You could say the ‘Defy’ offers a few things that other smartphones don’t. It’s water resistant, scratch proof, dust proof and drop proof. It’s a device which you can throw into your pocket without having to stop and think which side you put your change in. It’s a life-proof smartphone. At last.
Along with its durability the Defy brings along the entire gamut of Googley goodness. Apps, email, calendar – basically, everything that you’ve come to rely on day-to-day is included, thanks to the Android 2.1 (Éclair) operating system. It also comes packed with Motorola’s MotoBlur overlay, which allows you to stay fully up-to-date with all your communications via a series of widgets on your home screen(s).
In addition to the cutting edge software, Motorola have packed the Defy with reliable, powerful hardware. It comes with an 800 MHz Ti OMAP3610 processor, which sees the device tab along at a good pace and also includes 512MB ROM and 2GB of on-board storage, which leaves plenty of room for installing apps and storing media, naturally you can supplement that with a MicroSD card up to 32GB.
You won’t find yourself let-down by the Defy’s media functionality either. It boasts a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus, LED flash, geo-tagging and face detection, which takes decent still images.
It can also capture video at 680x480 resolution, which may be a bit behind it’s 720P shooting brethren but it is still more than sufficient for the casual user. Both video and images are rendered nicely on the device’s excellent 3.7-inch Gorilla Glass capacitive screen.
As you’d expect you also get the usual array of connectivity options which include 3G, HSDPA (up to 7.2 Mbps), HSUPA (up to 2 Mbps), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (b,g,n) and DLNA, so you never have to worry about being out of the loop.
Overall the Defy is a good device. It’s strong, practical and easy to use as well as being a nice looking smartphone. It is a little bigger than some of its competitors but the feel of the device offsets any feeling of discomfort when it’s in the hand. So if you’re a person who needs a device that can keep its head while others around it are losing theirs, or you’re just a fat-fingered clumsy oaf (like me), give the Motorola Defy a look.