Motorola’s original Defy was the company’s attempt at making a durable hard-wearing phone that didn’t look like military grade hardware and it’s an experiment was largely successful.
The Defy + is an upgraded version with a faster 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, an improved TI OMAP 3620 chipset and it's running Android 2.3 Gingerbread instead of version 2.2.
Externally, everything else is exactly the same, which means that visually it’s okay looking, if a little chunky. The plastic feels a bit cheap but due to the way the phone has been reinforced, presumably internally and out-of-sight, it isn’t exactly flimsy.
Some of the durability measures are quite visible such as the external screws, latch-on battery cover and rubber port covers that do lend it a very rugged appearance. Motorola has gone for four capacitive buttons here, which are found at the bottom of the phone below the screen.
The screen is the same as the original Defy’s, but it’s worth mentioning again because it’s actually rather good. The Defy + uses a 3.7-inch TFT capacitive multi-touch display with a resolution of 480x854 pixels. This also gives a high pixel density of 265 pixels-per-inch (PPI), meaning everything on screen has a great deal of clarity and sharpness.
As you would expect from a smartphone that focuses on being tough, toughened phone Gorilla Glass has been used for the screen for some added resistance to knocks and scrapes.
Performance-wise, everything's quite responsive and smooth, in part thanks to the updated operating system. Motorola’s MOTOBLUR interface overlay doesn’t appear to affect speed very much and it’s fairly intuitive to use - the live widgets are particularly useful and well thought out.
MOTOBLUR also includes a cloud storage service as well as social network and messaging integration, which it can feed to your homescreen via custom widgets. Android’s already considerable customisation is extended nicely with Motorola’s interface.
We found the keyboard awkward to use on the relatively small screen. However, the Defy + includes Swype text input, which is useful when the conventional approach is a bit clunky, particularly in profile orientation.
The phone comes with 2GB of in-built storage and 512MB of RAM. There’s also 1GB of ROM, something its predecessor didn’t have, and it has expandable memory thanks to a microSD slot capable of taking cards up to 32GB. A 2GB card is provided with the Defy + as standard.
The camera is much the same as the one found on the original Defy. It’s a 5-megapixel affair with a resolution of 2592Ñ…1944 pixels, autofocus, geo-tagging, digital zoom, LED flash and image stabilisation.
It’s not brilliant but it gets the job done and the stabilisation is fairly effective too. It’s fair to say this phone puts out images and video sourced elsewhere through the screen at a better quality than it captures them itself.
So what’s our conclusion about the Defy +? Well, we think it’s a decent enough handset and the little extra pep granted by the operating system upgrade is a welcome addition. We’re just not sure it warrants the £213 and upwards price tag, though.
Don't get us wrong, the screen is great, the performance is good and the interface is easy to get to grips with. It's just there are nicer Android smartphones around for similar money.
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