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by Eric M. Zeman & Rich Brome
November 5, 2009

HTC Droid Eris

Droid Eris / Moto Droid

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The HTC Eris is Verizon's second phone to run the Android platform. It is essentially a slightly re-designed HTC Hero, which was announced earlier this year. It makes some significant changes to the hardware when compared to the Sprint version of the Hero, and that's mostly good.

The Eris is noticeably thinner and lighter than the Sprint Hero, but retains the same display and feature set. It's black and coated in a soft-touch paint job. On the whole, it feels really good in the hand. The combination of size, weight and materials makes it very appealing.

The display is the same 3.2-inch 320 x 480 that's on the other two versions of the Hero. It looks good, though after seeing the Motorola Droid, everything else pales in comparison.

HTC has also changed the control keys under the display. It has ditched most of the physical buttons and replaced them with four capacitive buttons that are very similar to those on the Motorola Droid. These four capacitive buttons provide haptic feedback when pushed. The buttons on the sides of the device are kept to a minimum, and they all worked well.

As for the user interface, it is running HTC's Sense UI. It features seven customizable home screens and some home-brewed apps from HTC. Sense is intuitive for the most part, and the underlying Android menus are all the same as on other Android 1.6 phones.

The slightly smaller footprint and solid software on the Eris make it an enticing alternative to the Droid -- especially since it costs half as much ($100 v. $200).

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