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Verizon Holiday Line-Up

Droid Eris Casio Brigade Convoy Choco. Touch Curve 8530 Comments  25  

Nov 5, 2009, 11:51 AM   by Eric M. Zeman & Rich Brome

Phone Scoop spent some quality time with Verizon Wireless' line-up of holiday devices, including the HTC Eris, Casio Brigade, LG Chocolate Touch, Samsung Convoy and BlackBerry Curve 8530.

HTC Droid Eris  

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).

About the author, Eric M. Zeman & Rich Brome:

Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.

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Comments

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This forum is closed.

jpascual

Nov 30, 2009, 6:07 PM

Brigade, Conviy, Choco Touch, come with voice email

A little known app found in the Media Center catalog -> Email category, makes the Brigade, Convoy, and Choco Touch a bit easier to use for email. The app is called Vemail and it is a mobile email app that lets you speak email and get many attachment types (document, images, audio, but not video).
cellfoneluva

Nov 5, 2009, 4:40 PM

Verizon really aggressive this year

Android phones, Crackberry Storm 2. Very interesting things going on. Now all they gotta do is have better pricing plans.
If their plans were as cheap as Tmobile or Sprint, then you could expect the same network coverage you get from both...which is virtually none.

When comparing plans to AT&T, they are virtually the same and both have data requirements.

I love...
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No question. They are coming out swinging. This also explains why they are raising the ETF on advanced devices... They plan to sell a bunch of them.
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tapperal

Nov 5, 2009, 4:14 PM

What happened to the Omnia 2

It was going to come out this summer, then in Sept., then in October, then in November. What's the deal?
It was slated to ship with WinMo 6.1. That's what we saw at CTIA a few weeks ago. I've heard whispers that they changed their mind and decided to upgrade it to 6.5. It has very extensive Samsung customizations to the UI. Not just TouchWiz on th...
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I just called Verizon(11/6/2009)and they told me 11/27/2009!!! So will see? I want this phone.
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vzwrican69

Nov 5, 2009, 7:40 PM

Eris

I have had the eris for about 2 days and it is by far the best phone I have used to date. I work for the company and have carried all kinds of smartphones and this phone by far is the best of them all, slick, fast, loud, customizable, all kindsa stuff! enjoy it folks
The Company=Verizon? First THE Network...Now THE Company! Cool!
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fonefiend

Nov 5, 2009, 10:25 PM

Essex...8530

Articles says the soon to be released 8530 is their "low-end" BB. Aside from crappy camera, what else is low-end? Has the new pad, wi-fi,...

Do I wait for Essex and why?
The Curve is the affordable QWERTY model, and Tour is the higher-end QWERTY model for CDMA.

The higher-end Tour sports a better camera, as you noted, but also a much higher-resolution display, which is very noticeable when web browsing. You also ge...
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cwcanty

Nov 5, 2009, 2:25 PM

Great Info

Good stuff guys, looks like verizon users will have some nice gifts from Santa in their stockings, lol.

Chris
and for a million dollars what phone am I getting?
Well...maybe next Christmas. It just isn't Christmas if I cannot have an iphone on Verizon. 😢 *staring balefully at my 8330*
 
 
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