Content area
Full Text
While everyone's talking (or not) about the Motorola Droid, they would do well to consider the slicker, smoother, cheaper HTC Droid Eris
Bottom Line
The HTC Droid Eris packs lots of good stuff into a small, sleek package, but it can't run Android 2.0. It does make the most of Android 1.5, with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a modern smartphone. It can't compare with the iPhone 3G or 3G S in most ways, but for our money it's the better Droid.
It's apparently not common knowledge that there are actually two Droids: the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris. They're both Android-based phones, but significantly different in form and firmware. The Motorola Droid is a slider phone with a large screen and a physical keyboard that runs Android 2.0. The Droid Eris is cheaper, with a slower CPU and no dedicated GPU, but it's also far slicker than the Motorola Droid.
I played with both Droids for a few minutes at my surprisingly uncrowded local Verizon store, and it quickly became clear that the HTC Droid Eris was the sleeker unit. At $199 with a one-year contract and $100 mail-in rebate, it's cheaper, too. In fact, it seemed that most of my fellow shoppers gravitated to the Eris over the Motorola, which feels and looks like a brick and sports a nearly unusable keyboard. So I picked the Eris.
[ Is Android 2.0 the iPhone killer at last? | Video preview: See the Android 2.0 Droid in action. ]
For a longtime iPhone user, the Eris is at once familiar and totally foreign. The touchscreen has similar functions such as simple scrolling and wiping to change screens, but also includes four function buttons below the screen. These buttons provide quick access to the home screen or a menu for the current application; return you to the previous screen; and launch a search function. Thus, to someone used to dealing with only a touchscreen, the flow of application interaction is somewhat stilted, with commands and selections requiring taps to the screen intermingled with taps to one of these buttons.
These buttons are in addition to the standard call answer/call hangup buttons and the inexplicable rollerball. For someone coming to a...