A month on my Republic Defy

Thanks for posting. Will be interesting to see Republic bring more phone choices to the program.

How's it going at this point?

I signed up about 3 weeks ago. There are things I like, and there are things I don't. Coming from the Straight Talk Proclaim, I had expected it to be a little bit of an upgrade, but it really was a mixed bag. Here's my top pros and cons:

PROS:
1) Saving big bucks. With taxes and all, it is just under half what I was paying under Straight Talk (which itself was under half what I was paying Verizon).
2) Nearly instant GPS lock! Whenever I turn on the map, it has me to within a few feet in less than 3 seconds... even indoors. Much better than any of my other Androids (Proclaim, Prevail, and XOOM).
3) Better screen. Only slightly larger screen, but much higher resolution. Makes more apps behave better.
4) Camera - itself isn't great (5MP it takes don't look any better than the 3MP the Proclaim took), but it has two very nice features... Autofocus (barcodes actually scan right away!) and flash (great for emergency flashlight).
5) Durability - I like that it isn't hurt easily by water or light scratching on the screen.

CONS:
1) WiFi: Poor receiver and ONLY works on 2.4GHz (so microwaving my dinner makes WiFi calls bad). The Proclaim supported everything 802.11 b/g/n in both 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz freqs. This is disappointing for a device that is expected to rely on WiFi for so much.
2) RAM: Even with the new OTA (which removed some built-in apps to make for more room), there is only 300MB of space for apps. The Proclaim had 1GB! -- I didn't want to root the phone (Republic Wireless asks that you don't as it can hurt their research - remember, this is in BETA)... so I made the default install location to SD change (simple command via ADB). It helps. I don't have everything I want installed, but at least now I do have everything I need without it giving me the low mem warning.
3) Pausing: While driving, the music, podcast, whatever you are listening to (stored or streaming), it'll do very, very brief pauses from time to time. I tracked it down to the WiFi searching. Even with WiFi+ uninstalled, Open WiFi notification off, WiFi location turned off in location settings, and Latitude turned off, the brief pausing still happens. But, if I turn WiFi off completely - smooth playback.
4) Selective 3G: I noticed that while on 3G, it is plenty fast (900+ kbps) to sites like all the SpeedTest.net sites, CNN, and a lot of other places... but will go at a CRAWL (approx 50 to 60 kbps) on Google Play and not much faster (60 - 80 kbps) on Slacker (just enough to stream). TuneIn has no problems (listen to BBC Radio 1, air traffic control, and various local radio stations).

All said and done, I'm glad to use Republic Wireless. My hope is that the new phone coming out late summer will address the first 3 cons for me. As for the 4th con... I'm hoping that is just a problem here (relatively small town)... Sprint trying to save bandwidth for their own post-pay customers. I hear it isn't such an issue in larger cities with more towers.