Motorola releases Defy in Singapore, says Android 2.1 is good enough

(UPDATE: Motorola has responded to this article in a separate statement. Link here.)

If you launch an Android 2.1 phone just days after Google unveiled the latest Android 2.3 operating system, you’re likely to be asked why you are selling new hardware running on old software.

So it was no surprise when Motorola showed off its Defy smartphone to the Singapore media on Thursday, reporters zoomed in on the topic: why was this new phone sporting software that’s older than what you get on phones launched six months ago?

What was surprising was the company’s response. Instead of simply admitting that it needed more time to customise its self-brewed add-on features for the open-source Android OS, company executives launched into a spirited argument that we reporters didn’t know what customers really wanted.

All this interest in OS versions is a “press thing”, said Spiros Nikolakopoulos, Motorola’s vice-president for mobile devices for Asia and international retail distribution, who also told reporters that the company knows customers better than the media.

He argued that other phone makers – presumably Samsung and HTC – rely on Google to fix their problems with each new Android OS release, while Motorola gets things done with its own software customisations, or “Android plus”, as he terms them.

Some of his arguments seem valid: Motorola has created customisations, such as Wi-Fi tethering, a feature seen as a big upgrade for Android 2.2.

And the Defy, a mid-range phone costing an attractive S$528, is interesting. If it’s nowhere as stunning as HTC’s Desire HD or nearly as bright as Samsung’s Galaxy S, it is at least cheap. And yes, the 800Mhz processor chugs along faster than previous Motorola numbers like the Milestone and the Milestone XT.

But it’s fair to ask why Motorola can’t have Android 2.2, plus its customisations like the Moto Blur social networking feature as part of the deal.

After all, phones launched by HTC and Samsung of late have come with Android 2.2 or have been updated to the new OS, despite their respective customised features.

Even the low-end Huawei Ideos, free with a two-year subscription, comes with Android 2.2. So, why not the Motorola Defy?

[UPDATE: I will be fair here and note that Motorola did say the Defy will be upgraded, presumably to Android 2.2, in the next six months.]

Bringing up the Milestone here also shows how much – or how little – the company has moved in terms of bringing a new flagship model that can compete with the Samsungs and HTCs. When you say you want to buy an Android phone now, does Motorola come to mind first?

Six to nine months are a long time in the smartphone business. When the Milestone hit the shelves in Singapore early this year, riding on the success of the similar Droid phone in the United States, Motorola was blazing the trail for Android phones.

Since then, however, there have been no big success stories for the inventor of the mobile phone and a one-time contender to take over Nokia as top phone maker.

Today, the Milestone is looking sad and dated with a promised Android 2.2 update that is out only in the next three months – a full year after it was launched here. Other Motorola models like the BackFlip are not your A-list phones, by any means.

And now we come to the Defy, a mid-end phone which is not a flagship model to challenge a Desire HD or Galaxy S, let alone Singapore users’ favourite – the iPhone.

Sure, the Defy sports a piece of tough Gorilla glass, but the screen is nothing to shout about in terms of brightness or sharpness. According to Nikolakopoulos, Samsung’s Super AMOLED is an “average technology” that sucks up battery life – even if he is right, there is no comparison when you place the Defy next to a Galaxy S, or indeed HTC Desire HD, the brighter screen on Motorola’s rivals easily wins over fickle consumers.

Neither is the Defy’s “edge-to-edge” 3.7-inch screen a trailblazer. Place this next to the Desire HD and you’ll see who really has the screen closer to the edge of the device. No, it’s not Motorola.

Another feature that Motorola folks were keen to defend was the Defy’s 2GB internal memory. Sure, it has a microSD card slot for additional memory cards, but what if you want to install more apps than the 2GB allow for? You can’t install them on the microSD card, because that feature is available only to Android 2.2 and 2.3 users, not owners of Android 2.1 phones like the Defy.

Still don’t need an OS upgrade, Moto?

Let’s not forget that the recently-released Android 2.3 OS has a lot of useful under-the-hood updates, such as the ability for the graphics processor to run some of the OS’ graphics features, alleviating the load on the main CPU, and making a phone appear more zippy.

If Motorola doesn’t want to take advantage of these new features, surely Samsung, whose Nexus S is shipping this month and HTC, the maker of the original Nexus One, will do so in the next 12 months. And if it doesn’t keep up with the “OS versions game”, it will lose out very fast.

Having been back from the brink last year, the company may just make the same mistake as before – sitting on its success.

Remember the Razr, the phone that propelled Motorola to number two phone maker in 2005 and 2006? After banking on its success and missing the 3G and smartphone wave in the next couple of years, the company ended up having to split in two amid heavy losses to its mobile phone division.

At the start of this year, at the Mobile World Congress show, it looked like Motorola, along with Sony Ericsson, two long-time phone makers with very strong industrial design but which never did well in high-end smartphones, would be back in the game thanks to Android.

But at the end of the same year, you’d start to ask if these two former heavyweights will get back on the list of top 5 phone makers any time soon. Sony Ericsson has been slow to release anything better than its early-2010 flagship, the Xperia X10, which was only upgraded to the outdated Android 2.1 last month, and it is in need of a new flagship phone very, very soon.

Motorola may be a little ahead of the game, and it does seem to have a new Android tablet coming up soon, but it would still do well not to fall into the complacency trap it seems to like setting for itself.

Because it shows when a company doesn’t have straight answers for straight questions. Customers don’t care about OS versions? People don’t care for brighter screens? Perhaps Motorola should speak to Milestone users who have dumped their Motorola phones for newer, faster, brighter Samsungs and HTCs this year.