Snazzy and super-fast – two qualities you'd expect most smartphones to be endowed with. What if you expect a little bit of strength and durability too? This is what Motorola Inc. claims to offer with the Motorola DEFY, its new Android-based smartphone.

With an unusual international launch late last year - at the 25th season premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show where each of the wildly cheering and air-thumping audience got to carry a handset back home – the Motorola Defy has only recently hit town. Whether it's reason enough for you to rejoice as well, we find out here.

Checking out the handset for the first time, you realise Motorola is serious about having built the Defy to withstand some rugged use with its air-tight compartments that house the 3.5mm jack and mini-USB connector on the handset.

The back panel is a soft rubberised one providing a sturdy grip along with a small latch that you tug on to release the back panel and access the SIM card slot and the battery. Tiny screws along the periphery of the bezel hold the unit in place.

Despite having been designed for some tough use, the handset is surprisingly light, even when compared to some ‘regular' ones in the market.

Most part of the fascia on the Motorola Defy is the 3.8-inch touchscreen display which, again, is one of the very few ones in the market that stay as true as is possible for a smartphone, to the smudge-free tag (due credit to Corning Gorilla Glass) .

The seven homescreens can be adorned with a couple of interesting Motorola or Android widgets. The smartphone has almost no physical buttons except the Volume Rocker on the left. To navigate around the handset, you have four touch buttons at the bottom of the screen. On any of the homescreens you have the ‘Dialler' and ‘Contact' options at the bottom between which you have the icon to pop up the main menu.

We used the default browser to surf the internet and most pages that we opened – Facebook, The Guardian – loaded up quickly (Much quicker than most smartphones we have used). The display was easy to zoom in to with just a pinch. Pictures, even slideshows, barely took any time to load up on the handset.

Another thumbs up to the Defy for sound quality it offers. Motorola has built in two microphones that filter out background noise and amplify your voice so you don't have to shout over the traffic or the TV at home and the technology works well. Also, at places where a couple of budget phones couldn't detect network signals, Defy rose to the occasion.

With the GPRS on and with intermittent GPS activity (Google Maps), the battery drains rapidly. But with a decent number of voice calls and the occasional Gmail or Google Talk log-ins, the Motorola Defy just about lasted us 24 hours.

The 5-megger on the Motorola Defy did not live up to the standard that some of its competitors have established. The quality of pictures wasn't grainy but we had problems with the flash being too bright or the photograph being out of focus in more than a couple of cases. We tried out the Camcorder too when we were luckily at the mountains and it started raining. The result was a pretty average footage with bits and parts of the video being slightly underexposed.

You also have the DLNA app (Digital Living Network Alliance) on the handset. This means you can stream, store and share whatever content you have on the handset with other compatible devices such as HDTVs, game consoles and PCs through the Defy.

Transferring media on to the device requires an internet connection on the PC or the laptop that you hook it up with. The syncing is done on a Motorola Mobile web portal where you can drag and drop media from your computer on to the phone's external storage.

Our verdict

“DEFY is designed to handle everything that life throws your way,” is what Motorola claims of this smartphone. Well, break-ups and soddy B-grade movies might be obvious exceptions but Defy does seem capable of handling all that a smartphone is capable of quite well. It gives you a decent screen, a great user interface, tough yet not-too-ugly design, great clarity and a fast browser. An average camera and an older version of the Android do not seem to be reasons enough for those of you looking for a sturdy smartphone that performs and doesn't come with a ‘sell-a-kidney' price tag.

Rs 21,990

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