Review: Motorola MB525 (DEFY)

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Review: Motorola MB525 (DEFY)

The Motorola MB525 is touted as being "life-proof".

In November of last year, Motorola launched the MB525 (also known as the DEFY) in South Africa. We lived with the MB525 for a week or two, and put it through its paces.

The Motorola MB525 is touted as being “life-proof”, which is an all-in-one term coined to encompass the dust-, shock-, and water-proofness of the device. It trekked with us up a mountain (and spent the night up there), went to work with us every day, and was also by our side as we partook in a bit of wine-tasting. That ought to qualify as “life”. How did it fare?

Physical Features
Measuring 59 x 107 x 13.4 mm and weighing in at a paltry 118g, the Motorola MB525 looks small, but that’s just because it wraps so neatly around the 3.7-inch display that almost touches the edges of the front of this device. Just below the display the usual Android buttons (menu, home, back, and search) are found in the dreaded capacitive form. Yes, unfortunately, when the buttons are this sensitive, and this close to the screen, you find yourself accidentally pressing them often enough to test your sanity. And no, vibration to emulate haptic feedback is no substitute for true hardware buttons. Along the top is the speaker grille, and nestled alongside it, as usual, are the light and proximity sensors, but they’re hidden away so well you’ll struggle to actually see them. No front facing camera here, unfortunately.

Yeah, we dropped it in a pitcher of water, where it stayed for 5 or 10 minutes.

So, the front is standard fare, but then the device starts to get interesting (well, apart from the volume rocker on the right and the power button up top, which just isn’t “clicky” enough, and is more difficult to press than you would expect). The visible screws along the sides of the device look great, even though their sole purpose is probably to emphasize the ruggedness of the device. Then you notice that the Micro-USB connector on the left side of the device, and the standard 3.5mm headphone jack on the top both have pretty snug fitting rubbery plastic plugs. The awesome, rubbery soft-touch plastic back (the kind we love) has a special locking mechanism. This device’s internals are pretty well protected against the elements. And it’s been done without beating the MB525 with the ugly stick.

The Motorola and MotoBlur logo are etched into the back, which also sports a 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, and a second microphone for noise-cancellation purposes.

Did we test the ruggedness of the device? Well, yeah, we dropped it in a pitcher of water, where it stayed for 5 or 10 minutes while we took pictures. It’s waterproof, all right. Dust-proof? Well, the internals were probably safe, but the tiny gap between the glass covering the screen and the edge of the device’s body got filled with little specks of dirt and sand pretty quickly, which is an unfortunate design flaw. Shock-proof? It survived the trip up and down a mountain in a no-frills, no-fuss trouser pocket, and it was fine, so we guess it’s shock proof too.

All in all, a solid, very rugged device that doesn’t look half bad.

The display is gorgeous.

Display
We regularly caught ourselves stealing looks at the Capacitive 3.7-inch WVGA display, and with good reason. It’s gorgeous. With a 480 x 854 pixel resolution, it’s super-bright, amazingly crisp, and just “I can’t believe it’s not Super AMOLED” quality. It’s covered by, as most of these devices are these days, a sheet of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, which didn’t pick up one single scratch the entire time we lived with it. Touch-sensitivity was good, supporting multi-touch, and being one of the more responsive displays we’ve used.

It’s a pity that, for some or other reason, when you plug in the wall charger, the touch sensor is disabled. This means that you can’t finish that urgent SMS, or keep yourself busy if you’re bored, or hit the snooze button on the alarm while the device is charging.

Barring that, the Motorola MB525 has, in our opinion, one of the best displays in its class.

Sensors and Such
This is always our least favorite thing to write about, seeing as the standard array of A-GPS, Light and Proximity Sensors, Accelerometer, Bluetooth 2.1 and b/g/n Wi-Fi radios are all present here, and working as expected, as they are for 99% of modern Android devices. A little extra here, is the “Magnetometer” – or digital compass, something that’s often there, but you can never be 100% sure. The MB525 has it, and it works well.

We should probably note that the Wi-Fi gave us problems. It would drop the connection, sometimes as expected, during sleep, sometimes out of the blue. Then, it would take up to ten minutes to pick it up and connect again. It did this on three different networks. It’s probably a software problem, though.

Performance and Battery Life
The TI OMAP3610 processor that powers the Motorola MB525 at 800Mhz is very capable, but is definitely hamstrung by the software running on the device (more on that later). This is accompanied by a separate GPU, the PowerVR SGX 530, and 512MB of RAM. We weren’t blown away by the performance of the device, but it didn’t really disappoint either. There was a tiny bit of lag present when switching homescreens, or when there were menu animations. This was mostly in the OS itself, though, as both 2D, and OpenGL-driven 3D games ran without problems.

We received a brand new battery with the device, which may explain the initial disappointing battery life, but after two or three full charging cycles, we were left quite impressed. Heavy use throughout the day, with both 3G and Wi-Fi enabled, as well as quite a bit of browsing and Angry Birds, left us with an indicator still in the green by the time we plugged it in to charge for the night. Pretty impressive.

The MB525 comes with 2GB of internal storage (which is quite enough), which is expandable to 32GB with an SD card.

Camera
The camera on the MB525 is a pretty standard 5 mega-pixel affair. Motorola’s camera application was intuitive enough to use, but the “scenes” functionality, which is supposed to automatically adjust camera settings for you depending on what you’re taking a picture of, didn’t seem to make much difference, so I shot on “Auto” mode most of the time, which did a good enough job. As is usual with cellphone cameras, the MB525′s module delivered pictures that were acceptable with sufficient light, but it suffered in low light, and the LED flash either washed out pictures, or under-lit them.

This camera will do as a spur of the moment shooter, as it’s much better than the 5MP cellphone cameras of a year or two ago, but it won’t replace your dedicated point-and-shoot.

Software
It’s a pretty well known fact that those that have had the good fortune to use a device loaded with stock Android are loathe to return to anything a manufacturer has customized to “differentiate” itself, especially if it runs as deep as the changes Motorola has made with MotoBlur on this particular phone. Let’s just get the verdict out there: it’s horrible.

The camera on the MB525 is a pretty standard 5 mega-pixel affair

The launcher that sits on top of Android 2.1 feels like something hammered together just before release. Seven fixed home screens, that are, as usual, customizable with widgets. The intentions behind the MotoBlur-specific widgets were probably good, but they’re not very pretty. Granted, they’re not ugly either, but I’d rather download something else to display time, weather, and the like. Also, the layout grid on the homescreens is spaced strangely, which is nitpicking, but it still bothered me.

Sure, you’re free to download another launcher, like ADW or LauncherPro, but Motorola’s customization runs deeper than this. Apart from the usual slew of uninstallable applications you’ll probably never use, the dialer, message and contact applications are Motorola developed, and feel unfinished. Then there are the custom entries in the settings application, like the data and battery managers that, once again, were probably developed with the best of intentions. Who wouldn’t want to use minimal data, and have better battery life? Unfortunately, for some strange reason, Motorola has moved around menu entries, and things are not where you expect them to be. It took us a whole day to find out where you now turn off mobile data, for example. I’m also pretty sure that it’s a bug in this functionality that caused the problems we experienced with the Wi-Fi.

Apart from this, we experienced what was probably a memory leak, as the phone slowed noticeably after two or three days of use, requiring a reboot.

All in all, this phone would have been absolutely brilliant had it come with stock Android, like the original Motorola Milestone did. Unfortunately, it’s ended up being a prime example of why manufacturers should differentiate on hardware, and leave it to the user to decide how to customize their Android install.

As for the hackability of the phone…things are iffy. Root is possible, and not too difficult to achieve. It is also, under certain circumstances, possible to flash a new bootloader, and it is possible to install other ROMs. The catch is that the only ROMs that are available at the time of writing are different flavors of the original, official ROM, some of them “de-blurred”. So, no stock ROMs, and no CyanogenMOD (although a few devs are purportedly working on a port…here’s hoping!).

Conclusion
We’re torn, and a bit sad about the MB525. The hardware is really, really good. Unfortunately the software overshadows this brilliant hardware, so much so that we can’t recommend this without listing the caveats. If you want a rugged Android phone (we’re not aware of any other on the market at the moment), and you can live with Motorola’s customizations, then by all means, go ahead – but make sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for.

Build Quality: 9/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 7/10
Aesthetics: 7/10
Display: 8/10
Hackability: 5/10

Score:7/10