Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
The Motorola Defy+ is aware of social media, and can tap into all manner of online accounts. But it left us rather disappointed. First off, when you initially switch the handset on you are encouraged to set up a MotoBlur account.
While you can skip out of Motoblur setup doing so isn't a good idea. You can pull in contacts from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but you can only log into those accounts after you've set up a Motoblur account. Here's what you get to set up without a Motoblur account...
And with a Motoblur account...
When you've logged in to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the contacts app in the phone is automatically populated. But it took my handset an hour or so to pick up photos and full data for everyone I have contact with.
The worst part of all is that I couldn't see how to link contacts from the two sources. That feature seems to have gone AWOL though it was present in the original Defy.
This means if you want to contact someone through Facebook or Twitter you'll have to remember the name they're set up with on the network you want. It also means that when you view contact history, you only get partial data.
When you tap Contacts on the handset you get a full list of everyone (unlinked). You can put contacts into groups so you can message them collectively, which is a plus, and there's a search tool in the dialler.
For making voice calls you can nip into the dialler and start tapping away, and there's smart dialling so matches start popping up as soon as you begin to tap. There's only room to display one match at a time, but if you tap on the number found indicator, all the matches show through.
If you tap on a contact's photo at any time in these screens you get little tappable icons offering a range of ways to contact them. The number of options is dictated by the contact info that's stored about them. If you don't have an email address you won't get an email icon, for example.
You can also put specific contacts and quick tasks relating to them on a home screen, but you can only select two options from their range of social media, voice and SMS contact options, so this is a bit limited.
While we didn't have any problems with call quality, and found the smart dialling tool easy to use, we felt that Motorola had missed several tricks when it comes to integrating social media strands together. If anything this made our job of getting in contact with our chums harder than it should have been.
