Motorola Defy CM9 Review

                           Motorola Defy CM9 Review

9 months ago Motorola announced that they aren't going to release any update for Motorola Defy because a lot of users pushed Motorola to update Defy to Gingerbread (2.3.x). Instead Motorola released Defy+ which is basically a paid Android update.

Now let’s leave Motorola and their decisions aside and focus on our topic. And that topic is CM9 update for Motorola Defy

Although it’s still in its nightly version, CM9 for Motorola Defy is ready for daily use. Its original version was made somewhere in December

by XDA member Epsylon3. Latest version is on June 2, 2012 (although it might get outdated in a time when this review gets online).  

I divided this review in 4 sections:

1. Installation and boot
2. UI and features
3. Performance
4. Conclusion

1. Installation and boot

Installation is very easy (more info here).

1. Head Over To Stable recovery
2. Wipe Data
3. Install Zip from SD Card
4. Select ICS(Defy) .zip
5. Flash
6. Flash Gapps and CM7 Kernel
7. Clear Cache and Dalvik Cache
8. Reboot

You can download ROM and any future update here

CM7 kernel you can download here

Gapps (Google Apps) you can download here

When everything is set up you should be welcomed by boot animation which is standard CM9 one:  

  

First boot takes roughly around 5 mins and after that everything works great!

2. UI and features

When you boot CM9 you will be welcomed by its default launcher (Trebuchet)

Trebuchet is very fast, but HWA is disabled by default (except for browser) because its causes some apps to force close.  You can enable it manual by editing build.prop in your /system directory.

When you touch middle icon you open up app drawer which is very cool.

You list apps by sliding your finger from left to right (and vice versa).

Applications have their own tab and so are the widgets

 

When you touch icon in the upper right corner, you will open Google Play Store.

Widgets can be added by drag-dropping desired widget onto desktop.  

Because it built-in feature of ICS you can resize widgets by tap and holding your finger on the desired widget. Then it should look like this

If you go to the settings menu there is a bunch of options

  

As you can see, we now have direct option to enable/disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth!

One of the options is about the phone in which you can clearly see that I am not lying to you about CM9:

  

As of the 20^th of May CM9 got Theme Chooser. You can find themes on Play Store as well on the any other site.

Now let’s get back to settings menu. In Launcher settings menu you can set everything about launcher (merge widget tab with app tab, transition effects…etc) in Lockscreen menu all about lockscreen (add calendar, weather…etc)

Themes tab you have met above.

Since June 2, 2012 we have data limit option. It can be found also in settings menu. I think that you are familiar with this option.

3. Performance

Just like CM7, CM9 comes default overclocked to 1GHz. Default CPU governor is ONDEMAND, but you can change that by going into either bootmenu>CPU or in settings>performance>processor

While I mentioned, if you choose Performance menu from settings menu, you will find yourself surrounded with various options with what you can increase your phones performance (only for advanced users)

   

I haven’t changed any of this values except that I changed CPU governor to BOOSTED because it saves battery, while keeping great performance.

Entire phone feels snappy and all games are working as they should be (some with even noticeably less lag). Time required from power on to fully working phone is around 1 minute.  Browsing trough menus is awesome!

4. Battery

Device battery life is awesome. You can see that this ROM is optimized.

My Defy lasted 1d 4h 37min 55 s on battery (medium use) and there is still 60% left (it would be 50% but ny phone started to charge while I was transferring pictures from my phone to my PC)

Picture proof: 

   

5. Conclusion

While panorama mode in camera doesn’t work, picture and video quality is brilliant.  No hang-up during the calls, sms service is instant, no undelivered messages.

If you can get over not working flash player (unless you add this line to your build.prop file, in the HWUI whitelist line, com.adobe.flashplayer, ( or download already modified build.prop from here) and flash this fix: download) and panorama mode in camera, then this ROM is made for You!

Overall conclusion for this ROM is that it is ready for daily use, its superfast, its stable and its translated into 50+ languages.

 Author of this review: jameshook from BUG Forum and ppero196 xda-developers