Motorola Defy+ review

Last year’s Motorola DEFY was one of our favourite phones; its rugged construction meant it was built to take a few knocks, and a large screen, 5-megapixel camera and cheap contract price made it a sure-fire Budget Buy winner. The Defy+ is quite a simple upgrade: the 800MHz processor is replaced by a faster 1GHz model, and the battery has been beefed up from 1540mAh to 1700mAh, resulting in an impressive 12 hours playback in our video test – almost as good as the iPhone.

The only other difference is an upgrade to Android 2.3 Gingerbread – the original Defy is currently stuck at 2.2 Froyo after an official upgrade from 2.1. The upgrade to Gingerbread brings a big improvement in performance, and the Defy+ certainly feels more responsive than we expected from a mere 200MHz processor upgrade. A score of 6690 in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark may sound slow, but the user interface felt smooth when flicking between home screens and we didn’t notice any performance issues in apps.

As well as a performance boost, Android 2.3 has loads of small tweaks that improve the user experience, such as better copy and paste and improved power and application management. Of course, Motorola’s own Motoblur software defines the phone more than Android itself, and this sees improvements too, in the form of new services to aggregate into one universal inbox and feed – as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Exchange email, you can add last.fm, Picasa, PhotoBucket, LinkedIn, Yahoo! and YouTube accounts, to help you never miss an update from a contact.

The application tray has now been improved too, with links at the top to take you to recent or downloaded apps, and you can add your own custom groups as well. We have some issues with Motorola’s replacement Connected Music Player, however – by default, it tries to connect to the internet to retrieve song data such as lyrics, using up your data plan and causing crashes if it can’t connect. We found our music often stopped unexpectedly, which was rather annoying.

Shots taken with the camera are clear and colourful, with little noise as long as the scene is well-lit, which isn’t a problem with the LED flash. Video is limited to VGA resolution (640×480), but it’s clear and colourful and handles low-light conditions well – sadly, you can’t activate the flash while recording to use as a video light. Video was much smoother than we’re used to seeing from a phone camera, with very little judder when panning.

Physically, the Defy+ is identical to the Defy, and as long as you remember to firmly close the rubber caps over the headphone and micro-USB ports, it should be water resistant to one metre and dust-proof. The screen is made from Corning Gorilla Glass, and as well as being scratch-proof, it seems to shrug off greasy fingerprints, making it smooth to scroll across the home screens. Storage is adequate, with over 1GB dedicated to app storage space, so you should never have to worry about being able to install a new app. There’s a microSDHC card slot for added room.

With better performance, longer battery life and countless small improvements to the operating system and software, the Defy+ is a worthy successor to the Motorola DEFY, and if you shop around you can also find get it for free on a £20-per-month, 18-month contract, making it excellent value and a worthy Best Buy winner.