The
Motorola Defy Mini is kinda like a turtle – Strong, Sturdy and almost indestructible on the outside but take away that tough outer shell and you’ve got nothing more than a small, puny, very cute but unimpressive animal.
The
Defy mini is water resistant, dustproof and has a scratch resistant display, although there is no mention of IP67 rating so perhaps it doesn’t have the same water-proofing that the Samsung Galaxy XCover has – Scan the QR code to see what happened when we placed the
Defy Mini in a jug of water! As a rugged Smartphone it comes with GPS, Compass, Wifi and Bluetooth as standard and sees two nice additions in the form of DNLA and media streaming. It has a superb 1650mAh battery which should see you through 580minutes of talk time and 420 hours standby with light usage – social media and email syncing, for example, will diminish these figures considerably but with its handy battery saver app you can monitor and stretch battery life to suit your needs.
Motorola Defy Mini from Front showing Dashboard and from Side showing Volume Rocker and Shutter Button
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For the price of the device we don’t expect much and unfortunately with the
Defy Mini that’s what we get. The 3.2inch screen only boasts a humble 480x320p while HSDPA only runs to 7.2Mbps which, when both combine, makes for poor internet browsing. It houses a meagre 3 megapixel camera on the back but the front facing camera is a nice touch and surprisingly it doesn’t take too bad a picture for what you would expect. Shutter speed on the other hand is terrible, expect blurry images if you possess less than rock like steadiness, and video quality is poor with only 480x640pixel resolution.
The chassis itself is a durable little fella, which can at times be harder to break into than FortKnox. The headphone jack, MicroUSB port, back cover and even the battery are all extremely difficult to pry off (of course it helps if you unlock the back cover first…) so expect to incur serious nail damage if you plan to take the cover off regularly. For a rugged smartphone aimed at the more adventurous type, the small, slightly irritating to push on/off, camera and volume rocker buttons won’t make for light work with gloves on.
Motorola Defy Mini showing Back Cover Lock and MicroUSB port on side Enlarge
The most disappointing shortcomings of the Defy Mini are in its software with a 600MHz CPU processor and mere 512MB of RAM creating noticeable lack of response . Worse still it bears only a meagre 160MB internal storage capacity for apps and games. The final nail in the coffin, however, is that it only runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread while IceCream Sandwich is the entry level for most devices launching currently. Getting their portfolio up to date with Android is something Motorola have been lagging behind in but it’s probably for the best with this device as the puny processor and RAM abilities probably wouldn’t be able to handle Ice Cream Sandwich, let alone Jelly Bean.
Motorola does manage to make a likeable phone however, largely due to the effort made with its fun little features, such as Motoswitch, Dashboard and additional image filters such as aqua, emboss mono, negative colour and negative mono , alongside the standard sepia and mono in Camera mode. Activity Graph and Social Graph are two handy and fun little features of Motoswitch which brings up your most used apps and most dialled friends on your homescreen, as well as this you can have 3 different home screens labelled home, work and weekend which makes for a nice feature.
Motorola Defy Mini from various angles Enlarge
The
Motorola Defy Mini is a very likeable phone, from its LED light flashing on the top right corner to let you quickly see if you’ve messages without having to light up the screen to being able to jump straight to camera from the lock screen (something with iOS and Android 4.0 does naturally). It is clear that Motorola are targeting a younger less careful audience with this phone. Parents who don’t want to splash out on an expensive device boasting the latest technological offerings but would like their kids to have a “play proof” smartphone can rest easy with the Motorola Defy Mini available from around $239, €205 or £79.