HTC Droid Eris Review

• Tweet
• Share
• Email

Verizon must really love it they have the Motorola Droid, which many people regard as the iPhone killer. But what you should love is that Verizon almost competes with itself in the Android Smartphone market. Lately, it’s all Droid this, Droid that… and that’s ok, but what about the HTC Eris? If this little guy popped up at another carrier, it would have been the top marketed product for sure. But it does not mind. It just sits and waits for users to open their eyes and give it a shot.

And you shouldn’t mind either. This is a phone that costs $99.99 on contract and that provides so much more than what you pay for it. But lets not skip ahead and tell you more about it.

The “engine” behind the HTC Eris is a Qualcomm CPU running at 528MHz, you get all the connectivity options such as WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR as well as EV-DO Rev as well as GPS (with Google Maps) and a 5MP camera with autofocus.

First of all, the looks are not bad at all. The HTC Eris looks a lot like the Touch: rounded edges and a soft touch finish. Take a look at the pictures and figure out if you like it by yourself.

Ok, now that you’ve taken a good look at the HTC Eris, you might have noticed that it does not have a physical keyboard. It’s all touch. The capacitive display with haptic feedback is not bad, not by a long shot, but it is not as good as an iPhone (nothing is). If you are very picky about your typing solutions, you might need to look further, but if a decent onscreen keyboard doesn’t seem that repulsive, read on to find what the HTC Eris can do.

Because we mentioned the screen, you have to know that the 3.2” incher (capable of a “standard” 320×480 resolution) is very bright and sharp and if you leave the Droid’s high resolution out, the HTC Eris has the best screen you can get from an Android smartphone.

The physical buttons on the HTC Eris are only three in number: you have the send and end call buttons and the traditional HTC trackball that really does its job great. The electrostatic buttons just above the physical ones are not the easiest buttons to trigger, but you’ll get the hang of it once you get used to the phone.

The user interface is quite complex and manages to bring together Android and HTC Sense features in a way that is not hard to use and provides a great experience. You get Android widgets and HTC widgets that help you deal with various tasks. The number of widgets and applications is so large, and you can download so many more (or even create ones) that HTC Eris comes with 7 widgets as opposed to only 3 which is standard for Android phones. One thing that we would have liked is native cable syncing or Native Exchange syncing (that came with Android 2), but the overall impression is one of complexity, and that’s in a good way.

The web broswing is not very fast but it is of extremely high quality. Even tough it does not load pages as fast as the Droid, the HTC Eris has one ace up its sleeve: pinch to zoom. The video quality is great and the browsing is smooth, only that you have to wait a little longer for pages to load.

Voice Call quality is average for what Verizon has to offer, so you won’t have the best quality in the world, but you can still clearly hear what the other person is saying. Add in a Bluetooth headset (mono or stereo, your choice) and you are set to go.

Since Verizon includes a 8 GB microSD card in the package, you might as well load it with music (in MP3, AAC) and video (MPEG 4 with H.264 support is definitely a plus). However, it’s the same average experience you can experience with every Android phone. As a tip, stick to lower resolutions for the perfect playback as you might have some problems with insanely large videos.

GPS-wise, you get the Google Maps, but you don’t get the Verizon VZ Navigator (that is included with almost all Verizon’s smartphones). So you will have to wait until the Google Maps with spoken directions comes out of beta (that beta is on the Droid). Unfortunately, the camera is not that bright neither. Actually, the camera is probably this phone lowpoint, although we’ve seen worse.

Ok, so what have we got here? We’ve got a $99.99 smartphone that comes out not that bad when reviewed with the top smartphones in mind (this is what we’ve done). Compare it with any other phone in its price range and the Droid Eris is the obvious winner. The HTC Eris looks good, it feels great, it has a great user interface. It also has the pinch to zoom function that does a wonderful job. Overall, it has a great complexity that is not hard to use. Not many smartphones can top that. On the other hand, we don’t like that there is no media syncing feature, the camera is below average and the GPS comes without the Verizon VZ Navigator. So what ? We still think it does good compared with the best of them and it is the best phone in its price range.