Verizon Wireless has a second Android phone up their sleeves. Find out all about it in our HTC Droid Eris review.
Review summary of the HTC Droid Eris:
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 There's no doubt about it, the HTC Droid Eris is one of the best smartphones we've used. Like the nearly identical Sprint HTC Hero, it represents a serious step forward in smartphone design, and if you're a smartphone user looking to step up to something better, the HTC Droid Eris does a great job at nearly everything it can do. Ironically, comparisons to the Apple iPhone 3GS don't quite pan out, because everything Apple's phone does well, the Droid Eris doesn't, and vice versa. From advanced calling features to deep social networking integration to wide customization options with active, useful widgets on the desktop, the HTC Droid Eris on Verizon Wireless bests Apple's device, and even comes in ahead of the slightly faster, much larger Motorola Droid. But where the Apple iPhone 3GS excels, in ease of use, multimedia features and the deep App Store library, loaded with high-end games and apps, the HTC Droid Eris, like all Android phones, falls flat. We'd also like to see a much better camera tacked on this phone, and Verizon would be wise to patch up some holes in the feature set with VZ Navigator and tethered modem support. Still, the Droid Eris isn't just effective, it's delightful, and though new smartphone buyers might be intimidated by the complex system, time spent learning the ins and outs of the device will be rewarded handsomely. Release: November 2009. Price: $100.
Pros: Best interface on a mobile device. Social networks integrate neatly with online contacts and calendars. Detailed and useful information presented during calls.
Cons: Interface may be too complicated for new users. Lacks GPS turn-by-turn navigation. Camera is horrible.
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Full HTC Droid Eris Review:
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Look and Feel – Very Good
The HTC Droid Eris on Verizon Wireless is more about what's going on inside than outside. On the exterior, before you power on the phone, you get a fairly uninspired design with a few bad choices. Beneath the 3.2-inch screen, there is a row of touch sensitive buttons, the first poor choice, since they weren't sensitive enough and we often had to press multiple times to get them to register. You'll need a map to find the volume keys, flush on the side of the phone, and there are no dedicated keys for features like the camera (a shame) or voice dialing, among others. The screen locks up in a hurry, and the only way to turn it back on is to press the End key, but this usually also ended current calls, if we weren't done talking. Between the Send and End keys lies the trackball, which is nearly useless on a small touchscreen phone, and during our test period we used the trackball to take pictures, and that's about it.
Now that we've dealt with the bad stuff, we've got good news. Once you turn on the phone, you'll forget all about the poor hardware design, because the interface is not only engrossing, it demands complete attention. It's a bit complicated to describe in detail, so let's just say that the HTC Droid Eris, with HTC's Sense interface concept on top of the stock Android 1.5 design, never leaves you wanting more because there is always a deeper level. Instead of a single home screen, the Droid Eris gets a 7-pane window where you can drag and store all sorts of icons, shortcuts, widgets, smart folders and settings tools. Then, you can even swap out the entire theme of the device, and create another 7-pane structure based around your travel needs, or your social needs, or your business needs, and easily swap between these themes. This is a phone that has 12 different styles of homescreen clocks to choose from, ranging from stylish to simple to useful dual-clock designs, and you can place as many as you want on the home panels. Sound complicated? It is, and new users might find the extreme level of customization and choice daunting. But if you're used to smartphone ideas and loading news apps and features onto your device, or if you're willing to spend some time learning the ins and outs, there is no better OS to create the exact look and feel you need for every circumstance, and the best part is that every feature, down to the tiniest settings, looks polished and works perfectly. This is the best smartphone interface design on the market, without exception.
The phone uses a responsive, 480 by 320 pixel display, and most graphics and text look sharp on the HTC Droid Eris. In the most strenuous instances, playing video for instance, we could see the phone pushing its graphical limits, but the interface was mostly responsive, colorful and sharp on the phone's screen. HTC's onscreen keyboard is also the best in the business. It's very intelligent, capable of correcting your errors on the fly, or learning new words to store in its user dictionary. We love being able to hold down a key to access its corresponding number or symbol. That's a feature we wish every phone keyboard would adopt. The screen is a bit small for typing, especially in portrait mode, but HTC goes to some lengths to make the keyboard on the Droid Eris more usable.
Calling and Contacts – Very Good
Call quality on the HTC Droid Eris was good. Some of our calls had a slightly digitized sound, and there was some occasional fuzziness reported on our callers end, but this caused no trouble during normal conversations. Automated phone services recognized our every spoken command. Reception could have been better, as the phone hovered around 2-3 bars of service, but this never affected call quality. Sometimes, the phone seemed to stall as it tried to complete calls. Either it would register button taps slowly, or it would misfire and cancel a call if we tried digging around in the menus while it was dialing. We also experienced more dropped calls on the HTC Droid Eris than we're used to on a Verizon Wireless phone, but nowhere near the problem we experience with other popular devices. For battery life, the HTC Droid Eris could have been stronger. We managed to eke just under 5 hours of talk time from the device, which comes in below the HTC Hero on Sprint, but still on par with Verizon's own estimates.
For contacts handling, the HTC Droid Eris is one of the best phones around. It's easy to synchronize and link your contacts to all of your online address books. We paired the phone with our Google contacts as well as our corporate Exchange contacts and even our Facebook friends. You can even link to Flickr friends, though we'd like to see support expanded to LinkedIn or even MySpace. The Droid Eris doesn't just blindly sync everyone to a giant, unmanageable list, like the Palm Pre does. Instead, you can manually link and coordinate your contacts to avoid duplicates, import pics from Facebook and more.
When you're in a call, the HTC Droid Eris preents some very useful options to grab relevant information quickly about your caller. The phone gathers together messages and e-mails from the person to whom you're speaking, and also shows you upcoming events and calendar entries. There's even a spot for recent updates to Flickr and Facebook. For calling features, the Droid Eris was also quite capable. There's a voice dialing app for speaker-independent voice cailling; just start talking and the Droid Eris will dial for you. The Droid Eris also gets Verizon Wireless' visual voicemail feature, so you can listen to messages without calling into Verizon's service, then play messages out of order and quickly delete the ones you don't need. Conference calling was easy enough, though not quite as intuitive as we'd like, and we occasionally hung up on our callers when we meant to dial out to a third party.
Social Networking – Very Good
Unlike the Motorola CLIQ on T-Mobile, which is a more potent but more obtrusive Android phone for social networking, the HTC Droid Eris on Verizon Wireless is plenty capable, but keeps most features in the background. The phone doesn't come with Facebook preloaded, though a simple Twitter app, Peep, was on the phone out of the box. We downloaded the official Facebook app from the Android App Market, and it quickly integrated with the rest of the device, letting us check updates from a widget on the desktop or send photos directly from the photo gallery. Besides the contact sync features, there's also a helpful update notification system that tells you when friends have posted new pictures or made significant updates to their Facebook pages. The Facebook app on Android isn't as robust as the one on the Apple iPhone, and we'd like to see messaging integrated into a unified address book, like you'll find on a BlackBerry phone like the BlackBerry Tour, but when the app couldn't handle a task it shuttled us off to the Android Web browser, which worked just fine for the mobile Facebook page.
Gmail gets special status on Google's Android platform, but that isn't the only e-mail supported on the device. The HTC Droid Eris also handled our business e-mail with Microsoft Exchange support, and synchronized our Yahoo mailbox just fine, though these were kept in a separate app. Still, the Gmail app on Android gets plenty of cool features, including the ability to organize your mail by filter tags and other features exclusive to Google's own mail client.
For simpler messaging, the Droid Eris comes with Google Talk for IM, but no other instant messaging clients came loaded onto the device. You can dig for your favorite option in the Google App Market, but the phone really should have come with support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo built in. Text messaging looks great on the Droid Eris, presented in a threaded format so you can read all your messages together as one long conversation. The phone also presents multimedia messages (MMS) in line with text messages. The MMS interface was a bit confusing, mostly because there are so many options for sending additional content with your text.
Business – Very Good
The HTC Droid Eris makes a surprisingly capable business phone. The device comes with some important business features, like Microsoft Exchange support and Office document handling from QuickOffice. We had no trouble synchronizing our Exchange e-mail, and the Droid Eris did a nice job handling our numerous subfolders and other mail features. It isn't a complete sync, you don't get Tasks, for instance. To read attachments, the Droid Eris uses QuickOffice to open and edit files. It's a somewhat basic version, so you can't create a new document from scratch, but the phone did a great job handling our Excel worksheets, and we could flip between multiple pages easily. If you need more Office power, there are paid options available from the App Market.
All of those customization options come in handy for business, as well. HTC has added widgets for stock tracking, calendar events, and more, so you can check relevant information from the main home screens without opening any apps. You can read through some e-mails, and not just the first few words but rather most of a short message, and keep multiple clocks handy for different time zones. Beyond these, there are plenty of apps and widgets available to enhance the Droid Eris' capabilities, usually at little or no cost. Plus, the keyboard on the Droid Eris is easy to use and smart enough to remember your favorite business keywords, so typing documents and e-mails on the phone is an enjoyable experience. Our biggest complaint is the lack of tethered modem support, a feature made easy on the Sprint HTC Hero. We like using our phone as a modem when we're on the road, out of Wi-Fi range. Hopefully Verizon Wireless will add this feature to their Android lineup soon.
Multimedia – Very Good
The standard Android multimedia players are somewhat bland, so HTC has gone to great lengths to improve the experience, and this mostly works, at least for music playback. The HTC Droid Eris comes with a nice looking music player. It's a bit unpolished, especially in the Cover Flow-like feature that lets you browse album covers, but is too quick to change tracks while you're browsing. The phone also lacks advanced playback options for equalizer setting, though playback control was simple and intuitive. Our favorite Android music feature, the ability to search the Web or YouTube for related albums, artists and song names, is gone, and we miss that fun concept. We also think Android would benefit from a good desktop sync application for media files, but it was easy enough to manage our content and playlists on the device itself.
Movies on the HTC Droid Eris were somewhat disappointing. Video files that were cropped to fit the 480 by 320 pixel screen looked fantastic, but when we tried playing larger files, our videos looked blocky and chopped up. Some videos simply wouldn't play on the device. There is a YouTube app on the Droid Eris, but videos loaded very slowly over Verizon Wireless' EV-DO Rev. A network connection, and movies looked poor, like tiny images blown up for a larger screen.
The HTC Droid Eris does come with some nice hardware for music, though. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack right up top, so you can use whatever earbuds you prefer. Verizon Wireless also generously bundles an 8GB microSD card, which is ample storage for most users. Also, there are plenty of widgets to help control music from the home screens, and you can keep the tunes flowing in the background while you perform other tasks.
When you're showing off pictures on the HTC Droid Eris, the phone supports multi touch gestures, so you can pinch and zoom in and out of shots to check out fine details. This feature isn't yet available on the Motorola Droid, one of the few ways the Droid Eris trumps the larger, more expensive kit. Pictures looked good on the Droid Eris' screen, and the phone could rotate pics and flick through a large album quickly. It is also very easy to send pictures from the photo gallery, either by e-mail, MMS or uploads to your favorite social site.
Traveling – Good
In some ways the HTC Droid Eris makes a great traveling companion, but there are huge gaps in its abilities, at least for now. The phone doesn't come with any true navigation software onboard. There is only Google Maps, no turn-by-turn navigation, and this version of Google Maps doesn't include the free navigation add-on, like the beta version on the Motorola Droid. There is also no VZ Navigator, or third-party options like TeleNav, and none are available for this phone from the Google App Market. For all its perks, if you rely on turn-by-turn navigation on your phone, we'd suggest you avoid the HTC Droid Eris. Of course, we've heard that the Droid Eris might get an update to Android 2.0 in the future, and this might also entail support for Google's free navigation service, but we'll believe it when we see it happen.
If you don't need directions to where you're going, the HTC Droid Eris does a fine job with travel assistance. Google Maps works well for local search, and it comes with a great street view feature that helps you figure out what your destination will look like. There are plenty of apps available in the Google App Market, as well, for location-based services, currency exchange rates and flight information, whatever you need to help on your journey.
Fun – Good
The Google Android Market still has some catching up to do in terms of games and fun applications before it can compete with the best devices on the market, especially the Apple iPhone 3GS. You'll still find plenty of games available, but these will mostly be mobile-type apps, not great 3D gaming. The Android browser still doesn't support Flash, so Web browsing for fun is still limited on this device. The browser is plenty capable for more basic sites, but you won't be able to play most Web games or visit more advanced Web sites.
If taking pictures is your idea of fun, you'll want to avoid the HTC Droid Eris like it's the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Droid Eris has one of the worst camera's we've seen on a mobile device in quite some time. We assumed it would be at least as good as the camera on the Sprint Hero, which wasn't admirable to begin with, but pictures we took with the Droid Eris were horrible and completely unusable, even for online tasks like Facebook sharing. Perhaps these would pass as small MMS photos, but only if you're truly desperate. Pictures looked washed-out and foggy, with lots of noise and little detail. Bright light exploded all over the place, and in low light, images faded to near total darkness, with no flash to help illuminate the scene. Admittedly, under our studio lights in our eBay Shot, the camera performs at its best, but these are hardly normal shooting conditions.
The camera was also difficult to use. Though the HTC Droid Eris supports touch focus, without a 2-stage shutter button to lock in the focal length, this feature was nearly useless. HTC has at least added plenty of camera control options on top of the standard Android camera, which has almost no features built in, but if the camera still can't take a decent shot, what's the use? Check out our image samples below.
Leaves in the Pool
Flower (taken in direct sunlight)
Self Portrait, Outdoors
Palm Fronds
Palm Fibers up close
Self Portrait, Indoors
Light Cycle and Tron
eBay Shot
Staying Informed – Very Good
The Web browser on the HTC Droid Eris did a great job with all of our favorite news sites, including CNN and the New York Times page. All of these loaded just fine in their desktop version, no need for the condensed mobile edition. Of course, Google Reader looked great and functioned properly, marking up our RSS feeds as we read through them. Still, we wish Google would treat Reader as a special case and create a more powerful app for their own mobile OS.
Beyond our news sites, the HTC Droid Eris also came with plenty of apps and widgets to keep us up to date. There are a few different weather options on the device, and HTC has the coolest-looking weather apps on their phones. There are stock tickers and widgets to display news and RSS feeds directly on the home screens, as well. In all, it was very easy to quickly check information and stay informed with the HTC Droid Eris.
Price and availability
The HTC Droid Eris is available now from Verizon Wireless for $100 with a contract agreement.
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