Motorola Defy Pro is the first ruggedized Android phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard

Two of the more niche markets for Motorola over the past couple of years, have been the ruggedized smartphone market and the physical keyboard market. Motorola was the first to make a ruggedized Android smartphone (Motorola Defy) that still looked pretty much like any regular Android phone, rather than look like a brick. In the same time the Motorola Defy and its successor, the Motorola Defy+, still managed to be built like tanks and obtain all the necessary IP67 certification for being water resistant and dust proof.

In a time when HTCis giving up on making physical keyboards, and RIM is on the verge of collapsing, Motorola is trying to take advantage of this opportunity by continuing to build smartphones with portrait keyboards, like the Droid Pro for people who still haven’t gotten used to virtual touch keyboards yet. This includes either people who send a lot of text messages or professionals who need to send a lot of e-mails and have used Blackberries in the past.

By combining both of these major features, they’ve now made the Motorola Defy Pro, which is both ruggedized and has a physical portrait keyboard as well. We don’t know that much about its other specs yet, other than the fact that it has a 2.7″ display with Gorilla Glass protection, a 5MP camera, microSD, DLNA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and that it will most likely have Android 2.3.

That’s perhaps the most disappointing thing about it – that it comes with an OS that is almost 2 years old, when Android 4.0 has been out for 8 months already. From what I can see, they are trying to promote QuickOffice on it, but I don’t know if it’s purely coincidental because it’s a great Office app, or because Google just acquired it.

The Motorola Defy Pro will only be available in Brazil for now, starting July 15th. Motorola hasn’t mentioned the price, but I assume it will be a reasonable one, just like the price for the previous Defy smartphone.