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Motorola Defy Review

2010-12-23
what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here at a full review for you of the Motorola Defy it's a mid to high range Android handset let's go ahead and see if it's worth your hard-earned money and if it deserves a place in your pocket let me run through the specs very quickly here on the defy it's got a 3.7 inch and of course that's diagonal capacitive screen with a resolution of 480 x 854 it's being powered by a texas instruments omap 3610 processor which we've seen in many different phones with a speed of 800 megahertz scott 512 megabytes of ram on its back side and some little music in the background I turn it over it's got a 5 megapixel camera with flash it's being powered by android 2.1 which is now a bit of an antiquated operating system and of course it's got motoblur sitting on top of it which we will most definitely talk about it's got a microSD expansion card slots pretty much what you'd expect from an Android handset it's got two gigs built in but the big sort of white elephant in the room when you look at the defy is this looks is an ugly ugly ugly phone they can say that it defies what a phone should look like I was cheesy but this is a classic case of function over form because it looks actually given some additional functionality this phone is water-resistant actually so if you look at the places where water might seep in so there's a top 3.5 millimeter headset jack you see there's a plug there on the back where the battery door is I actually make a full sealed seam and on the side you can see these visible screws are there three on each which makes the phone actually water resistant I've seen some of the views where people have actually thrown this phone in a cup of water and it does actually work so why would you want that if you live in an area where you get a lot of rain or snow in or outside a lot and you're worried about possibly water logging your phone you may want to look at the Motorola Defy but before you go out and buy one watch the rest of this video because a lot of things about the phone that you might like and not like alright so now that we got that out of the way let's talk about call quality I did a 20 call test and this is an unlocked model you can pick this phone up on a two-year contract before in the US on carrier from t-mobile otherwise the folks at clove co uk hooked us up with a review unit this model can be used on any carrier so because it can be used on any carrier I tried it on AT&T and t-mobile and I make 10 calls from each I had many more dropped calls on both carriers and I have on any other phone that I've tested recently i have three drop calls on 18t out of 10 and I to drop calls on tmobile out of 10 which is really unacceptable if you can get through the drop call issues which maybe you need to just this review unit you're going to have a pretty decent call quality was relatively clear no white noise on my end no white noise and the colors other end because of all of the ceiling that we have here the speaker phone and the grill lesser of underneath the speaker phone there's a big cupboard so you're gonna get a muted speaker phone experience so if you're someone at least like me who relies very heavily on speakerphone i like to use it you know i'm sitting at my desk or even if I'm I of course in the passenger seat of a car it's not going to be the best experience for do something to keep in mind alright so let's talk about one of the other sort of things about the phone that you're going to use quite a bit and that's the keyboard and let's go ahead and jump into text message I'll show you what this looks like it does come pre-loaded with swype so for you android folks that like that you're going to have the option so here is the motoblur keyboard yes it's a 3.7 inch screen which is a relatively standard screen size for phones and we've seen it on a ton of different devices and typing has been very good but the motoblur keyboard does not make the best use of screen real estate certainly there are a ton of third-party options but I have not enjoyed typing on this phone at all I have relatively normal sized thumbs I'd like to put my finger over you can see it's covering up a huge portion of the phone so I've had a really hard time typing anything on it this is typing it just hasn't worked out quite well fortunately because it is an Android device you've got an awesome speech to text functionality so if you've got big thumbs you're going to want to look at either a third-party keyboard option even if that's just the stock android keyboard or you're going to want to learn how to use swype something to keep in mind all right so let's talk about the browser and turn the performance of the browser here let's go ahead and launch technobuffalo since this is running android 2.1 you're not going to have full flash 10.1 support but you will have what's called flashlight not like you want to light up a dark room I got a flashlight the flash li te which is going to give you a flash functionality but not as smooth as you get on a flash 10.1 device so we've seen this processor use quite a bit this ti omap 3610 800 megahertz but oftentimes the processor has been much better optimized for the software that it's running I'm not so here including results another unfortunate sort of sluggy experience as you can see here on the browser pinch-to-zoom still works and it works ok scrolling is smooth but not as buttery smooth as we've seen another Android devices but it certainly passable will get the job done you can do a little pitch to zoom action or double tap to zoom and it will work for you colors on it you can see right here there's some sort of bright blue colors down here and the Facebook look very muted the screen is kind of blah pictures don't look terribly bright the colors don't really pop it's got an okay resolution the 480 x 854 but the screen doesn't do the best job with the images and colors alright so the operating system itself is again running android 2.1 with motoblur and i talked about motoblur quite a bit ad nauseam I suppose on a lot of other phones I am not the biggest fan of it and I'm not the biggest fan of but not because of its functionality which aggregates all of your social media contacts but mostly because have the user experiences and how it looks I do not like this colored interface with the phone and your menu button and then your contacts I just don't think it worked very well and sort of the default icons that you get with motoblur I don't think are very user intuitive so you can see the moto widgets that you get you can use now if you are a big social media fanatic you know you may like some of these widgets and plugins I've just never been the biggest fan of I think there are a lot of third-party widgets out there that do similar functionality that look a lot nicer the motoblur doesn't really take away any functionality but I find myself getting rid of all the motoblur widgets and functionality or not functionality we get to icons that are associated with it sort of get it back to his closest stock Android experience as I can so something to keep in mind if you've used another Motorola device in the past you may want to check out motoblur if you have access to another Motorola device you might want to try motoblur and see if it's going to be for you there are different versions some that have these colored icons at the bottom and some that do not so I'm going to run a quadrant benchmark test and what this does is it runs it through a ton of different benchmarks I guess and give today score for performance though certainly the score is not always the most accurate way to gauge the performance of a phone but do you run it on all of my reviews if you get a baseline an idea for a performance so I also have a cast killer here can't recommend using in general Android usage but you want to make sure that all the memory itself is cleared out before I go ahead and run the quadrant test so if you want to see this whole test being run I'll put at the end of the video otherwise I'm going to jump right into the tech all right so here are the results of the quadrant benchmark new test and I'll move it up here so you guys can see it a little bit better so the nexus one came out on top followed by the motorola droid x which is running the newest version arrow was a newest version of android 2.2 we've got the evo and you've got the droid x run in the older version of android 2.1 then you've got our device followed by the galaxy s older version nexus one desire Sonja area can explore XP rather moto droid and HTC magic so these results the more you run them sort of the various results you're going to going to get but generally this has come out right in the middle actually ran this test before I film this and it was right in the middle as well so you're not going to get outstanding performance you're not going to get the worst performance in the world you're going to get kind of blah performance if i was looking to get serve a mid to high range even a motorola android advice I think you might be better served looking at something like the motorola Bravo for example very similar specs but I found that to have much much much better performance and screen for that matter so while there's nothing wrong here with this phone there's nothing great about it either it's sort of a average android phone that's gonna ring when you needed to to make phone calls it's gonna let you get online but it's not going to do anything that's going to amaze you I'm a lot of people that might be exactly what you're looking for just a phone that's going to function you're going to get relatively decent battery life out of it and it will work and i'm sure that motorola will upgrade it to a newer version of android well that's 2.2 or 2.3 yet to be seen but it's a very forgettable phone on a one-to-five scale I give it a 3 losing out huge points for the drop ecologies which again might be unique to just my review unit and I guess I am jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo this is a full review for you of the Motorola Defy I will see you in the next video bye you
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