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Motorola Defy

Guest Sorensiim

By Guest Sorensiim
in Motorola Defy / Defy+

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Guest jamoiholland

Guest jamoiholland

Posted
Posted

I'm 110% interested in this phone, was just disappointed it dropped with 2.1, which is pretty criminal in late 2010. Put that together with Motorola being possibly the worst manufacturer at getting Android OS upgrades out to handsets, and its not a good combo. Unless custom ROM world (I'm 1 small step above noob) can bring us 2.2, and maybe a 2.3 ROM sometime after it lands, in which case I will go straight to the "Buy It Now" button without passing go or collecting £200...

And in reply to the earlier post, I'd definitely stump £10 to go towards a unit for the kitchen!

Guest dkSpook

Guest dkSpook

Posted
Posted

Just a few bits from me B)

Getting into the bootloader isn't impossible - just a slightly different way of getting there than HTC phones. Hold the volume-down button while powering on the phone. Once you get the Android and warning sign image, tap the bottom right corner of the screen and presto:

5194579958_880780d9e4_z.jpg

Theres been a lot of debate over whether this phone has a 3D chip or not and if it does, which one. Well let me settle that with a screenshot:

5193994373_d9101f2cb7_o.png

There ya go - PowerVR SGX 530

Guest toogoody

Guest toogoody

Posted
Posted

Hi dkSpook, can you please tell me how good is battery life on Defy ?

Guest dkSpook

Guest dkSpook

Posted
Posted
Hi dkSpook, can you please tell me how good is battery life on Defy ?

With my use - double the battery life of the HTC Desire I had before, despite them having the same screen size and getting the same use. It's quite good, after a days use with wifi banging away at home, auto brightness and auto update always enabled, I still have 50-60% battery left when I crawl to bed some time between 11 and 12 at night B). Your mileage may vary, if anybody knows a good battery benchmark app we have Desire users aplenty here at work, a single Desire HD and a Samsung Galaxy S, I'm sure they'd be happy to help benchmarking. I should bring my camera someday and shoot the entire lineup, the Defy is surprisingly compact! It has the same outer dimensions as my iPod video (5.5gen, rockboxed naturally), yet sports a 3.7" screen just like the Desire/Nexus One.

Guest dkSpook

Guest dkSpook

Posted
Posted
anyone has sbf for T-mobile DEFY？

The US T-Mobile SBF is reported to be floating around somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. I'd love to try out the wifi calling app, but I suspect it'll only work if you're a US TMO customer.

Guest toogoody

Guest toogoody

Posted
Posted
Theres been a lot of debate over whether this phone has a 3D chip or not and if it does, which one. Well let me settle that with a screenshot:

I think this debate is over, PowerVR SGX 530 is listed even on motorola developer site : http://developer.motorola.com/products/defy/

Guest dkSpook

Guest dkSpook

Posted
Posted (edited)
I think this debate is over, PowerVR SGX 530 is listed even on motorola developer site : http://developer.motorola.com/products/defy/

Yet they're still listing it as a TI Omap 3610 when I and others have seen it show up as 3630. According to TI, the 3610 doesn't support the PowerVR 530 chip...

Re-flashing my phone right now (man, I really should take notes when I tinker...) and grabbed a screenshot for you guys:

3630.png

There you go - short of cracking open the phone and physically having a look, I think this is the closest we'll get to proving that it is indeed sporting a 3630 chip.

Edited by dkSpook
Guest toogoody

Guest toogoody

Posted
Posted
With my use - double the battery life of the HTC Desire I had before

Sounds great! I am about to purchase this phone as my first android phone. Having good battery life is more important to me than having custom ROMS.

Guest dkSpook

Guest dkSpook

Posted
Posted
Sounds great! I am about to purchase this phone as my first android phone. Having good battery life is more important to me than having custom ROMS.

Just remember that "good battery life" in the smartphone world is still just two days worth of use B) I remember the Nokia 6XXX series, from just before color displays started showing up. It could do calls and sms, a crappy calendar and sync mails with your PC, that was it. But you got 10-12 days of use on a single charge... Ah, simpler times.

Anybody seen the Puma phone? A touchscreen featurephone where the back is covered in solar cells... Pretty cool actually. Imagine the Defy having a solar cell back so it would constantly charge itself when lying "face down" on your desk. My watch is solar powered (and radio controlled to boot, yay tech!) and not having to worry about batteries is brilliant. Granted, it uses a LOT less power than a smart phone, so the solar cells would only be a supplemental power source for any smartphone, but a most welcome addition nonetheless :)

Guest Liao Chou

Guest Liao Chou

Posted
Posted
The US T-Mobile SBF is reported to be floating around somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. I'd love to try out the wifi calling app, but I suspect it'll only work if you're a US TMO customer.

Is it reported on M3？

Guest twon

Guest twon

Posted
Posted (edited)

Does any one know if theres are any recovery images available for the Defy like clockwork recovery or anything?

And the answer is NO

Does any one know if its locked down like the droidx ?

Edited by twon
Guest kibiwi

Guest kibiwi

Posted
Posted
2.3 is just around the corner and we get 2.2 in Q2? Damn, if I wanted Sony Ericsson customer care and software development, I would have bought a Sony Ericsson phone!

Don't wait for official updates the only way is to cook the roms ourselves. So it would be important to bypass the bootloader like the milestone. It's an hard work and I haven't the skills to help but I hope some Defy owner can give us some great news soon... B)

Guest twon

Guest twon

Posted
Posted

2.3 will be out then so why dont they just wait till 2.3 is out and begin development on that instead?

Guest RickPinto

Guest RickPinto

Posted
Posted
2.3 will be out then so why dont they just wait till 2.3 is out and begin development on that instead?

Probably, when they ended the development, there would be 2.4 or 3.0 outside...

:P

  • 2 weeks later...
Guest tdodd

Guest tdodd

Posted
Posted

My girlfriend just bought a Defy on contract for £15 per month including 1GB of internet, 300 minutes and 300 texts. The phone was free and she should get £30 cash back from TopCashBack.

I helped her get the thing set up, since she has no interest or talent in figuring these things out, and I have to say that compared against my San Francisco it does seem to be the more polished device (unsurprisingly). I really like the soft touch keys at the bottom, although I hate the power button at the top. It seems to run smoothly and "just works". I'm intrigued by some extra touches that appear to be present in the settings, such as a data saver option that allows you to disable data and synch during specified periods such as overnight. This is all contained within the standard settings. I don't know why this feature is not in the San Fran, or how to add it. The phone also seems to keep tabs on data traffic, again within the "settings" dialogues, without the need for a third party app. It's too early to report on battery life, but it was charged on Saturday morning and has not been on the charger since. It's had a fair bit of fiddling with to set it up and explore, and to sync contacts, calendar, add ringtones and so on, and looks like it will comfortably last until at least the end of today. Not bad for a first charge.

If I was not enjoying such a bargaintastic time with my San Fran and almost zero cost service from GiffGaff I think I would grab a Defy for myself on this exact same contract. The contract is with http://www.buymobilephones.net, but obviously it is better to get there via a TopCashBack link.

Guest twon

Guest twon

Posted
Posted (edited)
And I'm back! - So's my Defy btw :(

Here's the skinny on rooting and modding the Defy...

First, rooting it is EXTREMELY easy. Get "Z4Root" from the Android Market, enable USB Debugging, run Z4Root, press the "Root" button. That's all. From here, I screwed up but at 1 in the morning, I had redeemed myself and revived my phone.

Long version: After rooting the phone, I installed Titanium Backup and started importing my apps w. data from my Desire. My locale setup is pretty complex and I've put too much time in Angry Birds to let that go to waste. Naturally I installed ADW.Launcher as well and used TB to get rid of that AWFUL pile of molasses that is Motoblur. I then continued to poke around in pretty much everything and everything on the Defy, knowing that I could always do a factory reset. Which I did, after a few hours. Now I wanted to do the "real" setup of my phone, just the way I like it. Come first reboot, I am greeted with the "Sign in to motoblur" and immediately press the "Skip setup" button. Nothing happens. I press it again. Nothing. I try setting up an account, but it never finishes. I have a friend call me, he is immediately disconnected...

Then it dawned on me: Using Titanium Backup to dropkick Motoblur the hell out of my phone, it was gone from the ROM. And some bloody nitwit had just done a factory reset, wiping all settings - and apps. Including ADW.Launcher. So now, that nitwit had no launcher on his brand new Defy... Crap. My head met my desk more than once when I realized that. Ah well, booting to recovery was the same procedure as my Desire: Volume Down, Power On, hold both. Now I was greeted with the Android "!" warning. And nothing else. No bootloader, no recovery, no nothing. Much yelling took place here.

I scoured the net and finally dug up a complete rom dump, got a hold of it, renamed it to "Update.zip", put it in the root of my SD card and booted to recovery, fingers crossed. Nothing happened. Even more yelling took place. After A LOT of googling and surfing forums, I found a set of .SBF files, the original ROM for the Defy and a program called "RSD Lite" that I needed to use in order to actually load that ROM onto my phone. Success! Joy! Dancing in the streets! I plug my phone into my pc, watch as the drivers are installed and RSD Lite recognizes my phone. I start flashing the .SBF to the phone and it reboots to "USB Flash Mode", looking all sorts of spooky in the process. And then RSD Lite tells my that either my phone is no longer connected or the flashing failed. Much yelling again. Looking in my Device Manager (Windows 7) showed an unknown device: "S Flash OMAP 3630". Great. Moto's own drivers don't recognize the phone when it's in USB Flash Mode. Many more hours were spent googling and plowing through forums and Android developer sites before I found the winning combination: Just the EXACT right drivers, RSD Lite 4.7.1 + a mysterious patch and BAM - My Defy was now being spoon fed a stock rom.

Naturally, I rooted the phone the second I had wifi connection again after setting it up. This was now 12 hours after first unpacking the phone...

So in case any of you screw up as bad as I did; here's the files you need. I'm hosting them myself, so please post mirrors if you can:

The stock UK rom for the Defy: Http://siimnas.dyndns.org/stuff/defy/JRDNE..._Service1FF.sbf

The *only* drivers you need: Http://siimnas.dyndns.org/stuff/defy/Motor...nect_1.1.31.exe

The *right* version of RSD Lite: Http://siimnas.dyndns.org/stuff/defy/RSDLite-4.7_patch.zip

And just because I would LOOOOOVE a custom modaco rom:

The SBF Depacker: http://rapidshare.com/files/386624716/Moto...alpha3.rar.html

Go ahead Paul, download those roms and start poking around - You know you want to :)

Don't let my experiences scare you away from the Defy, it is an AWESOME phone as soon as you replace Motoblur with ADW.Launcher. Just don't screw up as badly as I did :)

You should of just pushed adw to /system/app then when you did the factory reset you would of still had a lanucher. Factory reset only wipes the data and cache partitions.

Handy guide! I used it to flash mine back to stock so i could send it back because my speaker broke

Edited by twon
Guest heliosone

Guest heliosone

Posted
Posted

Im new to all of this (defy / 2days) and I already screwed up (trying to get rid of motoblur) (no launcher/system stuck after unlocking)

so I downloaded RSDlite 4.8 and the stock rom and flashed the defy (nothing else was necessary),worked like a charm and after that everything works fine again

BUUTTTT => shouldnt all (user) installed files/... be gone after a flash ?

all my stuff is still there,only the root seems to be gone.

Guest dkSpook

Guest dkSpook

Posted
Posted
Im new to all of this (defy / 2days) and I already screwed up (trying to get rid of motoblur) (no launcher/system stuck after unlocking)

so I downloaded RSDlite 4.8 and the stock rom and flashed the defy (nothing else was necessary),worked like a charm and after that everything works fine again

BUUTTTT => shouldnt all (user) installed files/... be gone after a flash ?

all my stuff is still there,only the root seems to be gone.

The original roms are "Service updates" which means they don't wipe your settings. Quite nice, really :)

But now that clockworkmod is out, you can do a Nandroid backup and have *everything* backed up properly.

Guest heliosone

Guest heliosone

Posted
Posted
The original roms are "Service updates" which means they don't wipe your settings. Quite nice, really :)

But now that clockworkmod is out, you can do a Nandroid backup and have *everything* backed up properly.

thanks a lot for the info !

Im stunned by so much userfriendly-ness :-) As I found my way from the iOS world to Android,I only know full reset&firmware restore ,which is especially great if you dont have a recent backup ....

I just googled around (again) so I dont ask stupid questions (all the time ;) ) ,and if Im not wrong, a clean (deblurred) custom rom is around the corner,so I guess I stop screwing around to get my defy deblurred with my trial&error methode :D

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