Motorola Defy+ still tough, now 25 per cent faster

The new Motorola Defy+ can take a punch. In fact it can take all kinds of shoddy treatment on the chin: like the original Motorola Defy, the new Android smart phone is water-resistant, scratch-resistant and dust-proof.

A toughened screen, sturdy frame and sealed rubberised ports mean you can drop it, get it wet or take it it to the beach. Or all three: take it to the beach and drop it in the water, and the Defy+ will shrug its shoulders and be all, "What? Say something."

You can carry it with you when you free dive to hitherto unexplored depths of the ocean and use it as you trek across the harshest, most remote tracts of desert. Or more likely pretend to drop it in your pint to show off to your mates.

The Defy packs a 3.7-inch touchscreen, the same size as its predecessor, protected by toughened Corning Gorilla Glass. The 5-megapixel camera is the same too, and there's the same 2GB of memory to store movies and music -- so you can watch Lawrence of Arabia while trekking across the desert, or Jaws while you're down at the beach.

The Defy+ is faster than its grizzled older sibling -- Motorola says 25 per cent faster -- packing a 1GHz processor to replace the original phone's 800MHz CPU.

The software is Android 2.3, known as Gingerbread. It also includes Motoblur, Motorola's front-end interface. We're not Motoblur's biggest fans, but it does include widgets you can use to customise your home screen so you see information such as your friends' updates on your home screen.

Motoblur could be a casualty of yesterday's news that Google is buying Motorola. The Big G, the company behind Android, will fork out around £7.6bn for Motorola Mobility, the mobile phone and tablet arm of Moto, although that's probably got more to do with securing a raft of patents in the fight against Apple than any desire to get into the hardware side of things.  

UK release dates haven't been confirmed, but Motorola says the Defy+ will brave the elements in early autumn.