Thought ( मनन ) - 28: (Technical) A look at half empty glass of mobile world

Motorola defy a rugged smartphone was announced on 1st of October, 2010. Later an updated version of this, defy+ was announced in 2011.The original defy had eclair and motorola released an froyo update for this phone. Defy+ was lucky enough to get shipped with android  Gingerbread inside.


So I would like to compare these two phone models released 2-3 years ago to high end phones currently in market.

OS
Galaxy S3 was released with android 4.0 and can be updated to 4.1.x
Nexus 4 was released with 4.2
most of other high end smartphone are running with android 4.0 or 4.1

With contribution from quarx2k and other developers from xda community both defy and defy+  can be flashed with highly stable android 4.1.2 and work on 4.2.2 is in progress.

Camera
Most of the high end smartphones are shipped with 8MP which is improved just in current series
earlier all high end smartphones used to ship with 5MP.
defy series have a camera 5MP


Screen
I have to accept - current smartphone have improved in screen area. they have hd screen on board and larger screen size may be it was because of apple. Samsung galaxy s3 have 305 ppi density.
Defy series was shipped with 480 x 854 pixels ~265ppi. it is still impressive.

Body
I think defy+ takes the lead here as it is - IP67 certified - dust tight and water proof (up to 1m for 30 mins), which is super awesome. you don't have to buy screen guard, you don't have to fear water, you don't have to fear sports. you can even play outdoor games with it like-throw and catch :P.
For most of high end smartphones in market today do not have these features. Sony xperia z is said to have these features which is just announced and not reached in all countries yet.

Memory
External : Defy series support 32gb memory card as most of the smartphones today do.
Internal: defy+ have 475 Mb which is less compared to 1GB RAM in todays smartphone.
but Defy+ never complained  to me that his memory is low and we can always use external memory for apps.

Battery
the battery certainly is improved over the period to support such high resolution screen. S3 have 590h as stand by time, defy+ have 384h stand time.


Summary
over the period only screen pixel density and screen size have improved significantly. battery and cameras have improved to some degree. Battery improvement is minimal as it performance reduces to support large screens. There are some not so much developed technologies like NFC and voice assistant.