|  |  |  | | | | | MobileCrunch | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  This video is pure, unadulterated link bait. You know it. They know it. But you’re going to watch it anyway, because you get to see some smartphones get grilled. The survivor (or what passes for it) may surprise you.
Continue reading… 
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Short version: Waterproof and attractive, the Defy is a solid smartphone with relatively rare selling points. It’s missing Froyo at the moment and MOTOBLUR isn’t for everyone, but I consider this thing a great value.
Features:
- Waterproof and dustproof body
- 3.7″ 854×480 LCD with Gorilla Glass
- Android 2.1 with MOTOBLUR social web widgets and interface
- 800MHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 2GB internal storage, MicroSD slot
- MSRP: $99.99 with new contract (or $49.99 at Walmart)
Pros: - Light and attractive
- Bright, sharp, good-size screen
- Definitely waterproof
Cons: - 2.1 and MOTOBLUR chug a little
- Despite rugged nature, feels cheap sometimes
- I don’t trust these little flaps
Full review: I knew going into this that there would be parts of this handset that I’d like and some I wouldn’t like. But the Defy has surprised me and won me over more than I expected. The truth is, however, that I’m not the target demographic for its social-web-heavy MOTOBLUR interface and widgets, so I may sell those short. However, they’re not much different from any other MOTO phone, so I wouldn’t have lingered on them much anyway. I’ll focus on what’s specific to this phone. Hardware 
The Defy is being billed as “life-proof,” which is a bit of an exaggeration but we’ll forgive them. Their reasoning for calling it that is that it’s weather-sealed, and that’s no lie. The Defy can live underwater for minutes or probably hours at a time, and living in a bag filled with crumbs or dirt is no problem. This eases one’s worries but let’s be honest, most of us have gotten into the habit of protecting our phones from that stuff anyway. That’s not to say the sealing isn’t welcome. Not having to worry where you put the phone down or what pocket it’s going in is something I could easily get used to. And the screen (covered as it often is with oils from your fingers) sheds water amazingly fast and is very usable even when wet. The phone is surprisingly light and compact; I don’t know what I was expecting, but with a 3.7″ screen, you kind of expect a certain weight and size. The Defy is a little thick, but not offensively so, and its other dimensions are admirably small. The screen takes up almost the whole face of the phone, with very little bezel and the standard Android touch-sensitive buttons (menu, home, back, search) at the very bottom. Power and headphone jack are on the top, volume buttons are on the right (a little weird), and USB port on the left. The back panel has the five-megapixel camera and flash, and the panel is removable by sliding a mechanism at the bottom, which also works as a seal tightener when putting it back on. There is a single LED at the top left that seems to only have amber and green, but it’s welcome anyway. The headphone and USB ports are protected by little flaps you must move aside to connect. The headphone one is flexible rubber and seems to make a nice little seal when you press it in. But the USB flap is far less convincing, and reminds me of the one on the bottom of the G1, which broke off after a few months. I doubt this one is quite as fragile, but the way it rotates and the rather weak-feeling seal it makes aren’t heartening. With luck it’s a cheap fix if it does break. 
The phone as a whole doesn’t feel “nice,” though, the way the G2 does. Of course, the Defy costs significantly less and plastic is way easier to weather-proof, so this isn’t an oversight exactly, but the lightness combined with the plastic make this feel cheaper than it should. It’s important that I note that it doesn’t feel fragile, exactly, but the buttons and general experience won’t impress anyone. The duotone look may not be your style but I like it. It makes it look like diving equipment, which I suppose it kind of is. 
I love the screen. 854×480 at 3.7″ is extremely sharp, and it’s bright enough to work in bright lighting. The touchscreen was responsive and accurate even when wet (though not underwater), though things didn’t seem nearly as smooth as the G2 despite having similar specs. I blame MOTOBLUR. The keyboard for some reason struck me as a little small, which may just be in my mind, but it and Swype worked perfectly well, so there’s no real complaint there. Camera Nothing special here, but nothing wrong either. Five muddy megapixels and a harsh but usable flash, pretty much like any other phone out there. Have some sample shots, my friend:    The center one used the flash, and turned out pretty poorly. There’s actually a good amount of detail in the jade plant and screen, but the lighting was pretty good. I’d say you’re getting about two effective megapixels out of this, which is standard for a camera phone. Software and performance The first thing I did when I turned this sucker on was throw away a bunch of the enormous widgets that are on by default. I’m more of a vanilla Android guy, so I can’t hold it against Motorola, but there really is quite a lot of bloatware on this thing. If you aren’t careful, you could end up with two or three channels for every email, SMS, and social web account out there. For a non-savvy user, this could be an extremely confusing experience, and the initial MOTOBLUR setup failed to register my second Gmail address (and then failed to alert me of that failure), something not every user would notice right away. There’s an improved music app with access to some online services, but it’s still pretty weak compared with the iPhone or third-party apps. It’s good that people are trying to upgrade the player, but Google is the one who needs to step up here, not HTC and Motorola. My issue is that even if you don’t want or need, say, the “family room” suite of apps (which to its credit detected every member of my family in my contacts automatically), you can throw them away, but they’re still lurking along with the other bloat apps, and you’ll often see them referred to when you’re setting up this or that or adding widgets. The phone also chugs a bit, especially with lots of widgets and apps installed. There’s really no excuse for this when similarly-specced phones offer smooth experiences. Or rather, excuses are running out and phones really should be shipping with 2.2 by this time. To be honest, this phone would work a lot better with a generic 2.2 install. MOTOBLUR doesn’t do it any favors and it’s not clear why a phone for which the focus is go-anywhere should have a social/family/connectivity focus. On the CLIQ it seemed natural, but this phone seems like it should be loaded with outdoor apps like My Tracks, or have some other rugged-specific stuff on it. Conclusion The Defy is a solid phone at a good price (you can get it for $50 if you look), it’s got a great screen, and with luck, 2.2 will be rolling out to the Motorola lineup soon, which should bring some much-needed speed improvements and a few nice standard features. I continue to be unimpressed by MOTOBLUR, but the Defy itself is a great handset. Recommended for the moisture-wary consumer. Product page: Motorola Defy on T-Mobile     
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According to whispers around ye ol’ Rumor Mill, today was to be the big day for iOS 4.2 to start hitting iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads everywhere. As the daylight burned, however, a new rumor popped up: due to WiFi issues on the iPad build, the launch was being pushed back a few days. Aaaand sure enough, we’re told an ever-so-slightly modified version of iOS 4.2 for iPad has just hit the Developer Center, rockin’ a build number of “8C134b” instead of just “8C134″. While that doesn’t positively confirm that iPad WiFi issues are the cause of the “delay” (its not really fair to call it that, as Apple didn’t announce a date themselves), the fact that this new Gold Master is solely focused on the iPad and that our iPad has been having one helluva time staying connected lately just fit too dang well. 
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According to whispers around ye ol’ Rumor Mill, today was to be the big day for iOS 4.2 to start hitting iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads everywhere. As the daylight burned, however, a new rumor popped up: due to WiFi issues on the iPad build, the launch was being pushed back a few days. Aaaand sure enough, we’re told an ever-so-slightly modified version of iOS 4.2 for iPad has just hit the Developer Center, rockin’ a build number of “8C134b” instead of just “8C134″.
While this doesn’t positively confirm that iPad WiFi issues are the cause of the “delay” (its not really fair to call it that, as Apple didn’t announce a date themselves), the fact that this new Gold Master is solely focused on the iPad and the fact that our iPad has been having one helluva time staying connected to WiFi lately just fit too dang well to think otherwise. This is, as far as I know, the first time that Apple has modified a Gold Master after sending it out. 
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Between Soundhound and Shazam, I wouldn’t have thought the world was really begging for another service that could identify that song playing on the radio. Sometimes, though, something comes along that solves that problem we didn’t know we had and makes the whole thing worthwhile. You see, Soundhound and Shazam do a great job of identifying tracks.. but then what? You can buy the track on iTunes… which is great, for all the people who buy their music from iTunes. For folks who use services like Grooveshark, Spotify, or Rhapsody, though, that song they heard in the bar is gone from their noggin’ by the time the next beer hits the table. Enter Limili. The concept of Limili is by no means a new one: hit a button, hold it up to a speaker playing a track you want identified, wait. After a few seconds, it’ll spit out the name and artist behind the tune. That’s when Limili gets interesting. As Limili goes about ID’ing the track, it’s also searching for that track on Grooveshark, iTunes, Last.FM, Play.Me, Rhapsody, Spotify, We7, and Youtube. Once a song has been ID’ed, you’re given the option to add that track to your collection on any of these aforementioned services, be it that you’ve supplied the relative login credentials. Logged into Grooveshark? ID the song, hop to the Grooveshark tab, pick the version you want from the search results, and bam — it’s waiting for you in a playlist the next time you log in. So, the obvious worry: how is it at IDing tracks? So far, so good. Powered by the Mufin database, they’re not exactly starting from scratch here. I threw about 20 songs at both Limili and Shazam, and they both nailed (and missed) all the same songs. It was good enough to accurately identify the first 10 seconds of both the original version and the Glee version of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” — pretty impressive, given that they’re pretty much identical. Limili is currently only available for iOS, and will set you back $1.99 [iTunes Link]. That price currently nets you 100 song IDs per month, though the company has announced that all per-month limitations will be removed in the next update. 
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Pour one out tonight, folks. It’s November 12th — the day Google is flipping the switches and shuttering the windows on their free 411 service, 1-800-GOOG411. We’ll never forget you, GOOG411. You came at the perfect time; mobile was blowing up enough that everyone was constantly in need of phone numbers, but smartphones hadn’t yet become an everyman tool. It was always nice to blow peoples minds by introducing’em to you — and without your contributions to Google’s voice recognition database, Android’s voice search would be nowhere as wonderful. 
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Pour one out tonight, folks. It’s November 12th — the day Google is flipping the switches and shuttering the windows on their free 411 service, 1-800-GOOG411. We’ll never forget you, GOOG411. You came at the perfect time; mobile was blowing up enough that everyone was constantly in need of phone numbers, but smartphones hadn’t yet become an everyman tool. It was always nice to blow peoples minds by introducing’em to you — and without your contributions to Google’s voice recognition database, Android’s voice search would be nowhere as wonderful. 
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WinPho7 retail units have only been out for a few days, but a proper jailbreak isn’t that far off now that some devs gained root access to the system. It’s not like anyone really thought Windows Phone 7 would be locked up forever, right? It was only a matter of time. Developers swarm high-profile platforms with fun and profit in mind. Microsoft can’t be that upset. A good chunk of Winphone7 sales will come just because the owners will be able to use the device how they want. Hackability was one of the reasons the first Xbox succeeded. Creating a garden with impenetrable walls sounds great in boardroom discussions, but can ultimately hurt sales and hinder 3rd party developers – which again, hurts sales. via RedmondPie Upon closer inspection, (hounsell) documented some interesting characteristics of the application that gave it its native capabilities – most notably a DLL called "Microsoft.Phone.InteropServices", which if poked the right way provided COM access.
This explote came after one dev, hounsell from XDA-Developers, noticed that a Samsung app used a different code set than usual 3rd party apps. Instead of being based on Silverlight, it ran on the native WP7 code. Bananas started falling from trees and then came access to the root. It’s only a matter of time now before a rough jailbreak hits, followed up by a simple GUI-based version. Nice. 
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