A few points about this phone
Firstly, the music player looks nice. Mine is pretty tragic. It would appear that not only is Android different between manufacturers, but there's a third layer of abstraction with the provider. In my case, Orange. The "Connected Music Player" is poor, but it does Shoutcast - I listen to that a lot. I have installed WinAmp, but it doesn't do Shoutcast on 2.1.
You got 720p to work? Perhaps that is the difference between Motoblur and without? I can *almost* get it working, but the picture is jittery. Maps, navigation, all that stuff is a delight to use. I know the great GoogleBot can track my every move when I have GPS on, but it's kinda cool to be driving down the road looking at your little arrow moving on the map (child at heart, and no, I'm not the driver...).
The camera is pretty naff. It is fast and does all it is supposed to, but it seems like the pictures are too heavily compressed, so much that everything looks just a little bit blurry. But, then, it's a camera on a phone, not a dedicated pointy-clicky. It is useful to have handy.
I must tell you a few things about Swype. Where's the dictionary? It doesn't integrate with the phone's user dictionary. It has no "learning" mode, instead words tapped in my hand will be accepted into the Swype dictionary (typos and all) when you press Space. You can remove things that get in the way ( i'll instead of I'll ) but there is no way to view/edit the dictionary, and there is no way to switch off its learning mode. When you're taking part in forums with code and part numbers, you really wish Swype wouldn't remember all this stuff. There's also a security implication - is it remembering passwords too?
Voice quality to a landline is lovely. Voice quality to a mobile isn't. I find it echoey and - get this - when *I* am speaking, the other person is muted. WTF?
The "Data Manager" sounds like a nice idea, but there is a fatal flaw. With the data manager on, the News app will not sync my RSS feeds (maybe 100K tops). Conversely, the email app will happily attempt to fetch a 10Mb attachment. Over the mobile network. With Data saving options enabled. Hasn't it heard of fetching headers? Well, I guess I am asking too much of an app that insists on sending everything base64 encoded!
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It isn't all bad. Battery life is acceptable. I don't know what is good and bad as my last phone was nowhere near this sophisticated. Let's just say if I forget to charge it one night, the world won't end. There is also a useful "Flight mode" to turn off all the radio comms, and a cute back door that you can engage Flight Mode and then turn WiFi on, making it a little mini-tablet thing. The display is lovely. I mean seriously nice. A clarity such that you can read the browser even when zoomed out to the smallest text size. The phone, in general, is fairly nippy in operation.
I have serious complaints regarding the version of Android used, and also the lack of controls (script/cross-site/etc blocking), but much of this rests on Google's head, not Motorola. Even if a version 2.3 of Android appeared for the Defy tomorrow, would we get 2.4, 2.5? Why can't the operating system perform its own security updates? It is a real operating system in there, time we realised that.
I picked the Defy from the ones available because it was solid looking and had a good display. My main criteria, as I don't use the phone part much, was to play music, to have a decent web browser that can work from WiFi, and something that can be a pocket-sized PDF datasheet library. On all three counts, it hits a home run.
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My advice, if you like reading, don't bother with the Kindle app. I don't know about in the UK, but here in France I think Kindle was "epic fail". There's scant mention of it at amazon.fr, and I get pointed to the American kindle store, where prices are in dollars, some free stuff isn't free here (why!?) and some things simply aren't available here. Such as a favourite childhood story "The Secret Garden". So instead go to Google market and look for an app called "Laputa" (wasn't that a Ghibli? Castle in the sky?). It is a free app to read free books. There are no new blockbusters, but there's loads of older stuff (including "The Secret Garden"), plus authors making their own releases. I'm currently reading an odd (e)book called "Tokyo Zero". I can lie in bed on my side with my Defy reading... It's quite relaxing.
Summary: It isn't perfect, but I think I've found a new friend.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
