Unsung hero: HTC Eris

[Shady]

Alright, figured i’d give my first impression on the HTC Eris. This phone seems to be somewhat on the D/L with verizon as their busy promoting the Moto Droid.

The HTC Eris is the second android based phone verizon is offering for $99 with a 2 year contract, was honestly suprised it was so cheap. Anyways we got one here in at work yesterday and I’ve been playing with it for a little bit. Unfortunatly I’m not using the phone for personaly use so basicly just playing with it while im here at work, I’m setting up the phone for our CEO as hes a gadget lover and likes lots of little bells and whistles.

First off the phone is very clean looking, matte finish, 2 analog buttons and a trackball on the face, the only thing i find a little cheesy is in the matte finish seems to be a little bit of glitter. The phone feels great in the hand, not really slim like the iphone but not extremely bulky, fits nicely in the palm. The screen itself is smaller compared to the droid and iphone but none the less a very nice vibrant looking screen. The phone is very responsive, applications load up fast, web browsing is quite quick compared to a lot of phones, and the browser is very clean and renders web pages very nicely.

The G-Mail app is very nice and gives you almost the same feeling as if you were browsing through your e-mail as you do on your computer.

Being a complete touchscreen phone, and having a smaller screen I wasnt to sure how typing would be. In the little bit ive used it im acctualy quite suprised, seems to be very accurate to the touch but me and my boss both feel that while its smooth, the smaller screen pushes the buttons just close enough together that if your not a touch screen guru you might find it quite hard to tap keys accruately, i personaly did not have much of an issue.

I wish i could give a more in depth review, I’m honestly torn on another phone to get, I’ve come quite fond of my blackberry, but have already fallen in love with the eris, and well the moto droid is just the new hotness and I love the physical keyboard, the heavy metal case and big beautiful screen.

Anyways if you want an android phone and want something a little less bulky, and less exspesnive the ERIS is worth looking into.

[ninety1two40]

HTC makes some baller phones, it’s sad to see that 1/2 of their phones never make it to US carriers.

[Neo187H]

The eris is a very nice phone and is also running HTCs proprietary visial updates over android called sense. Basically the same concept as they did with windows mobile and touch flow, it adds a lot of ease of use into the rather complicated android OS. I liked the keyboard on it a lot, better than the iphones even, mainly due to the haptic feedback when you hit a key. I found that very helpfull with typing on the visual keyboard. The system is only running android 1.6 though so you won’t get some of the bells and whistles of 2.0 that’s on droid, like the google turn by turn nav. Course there are rumors that HTC will be updating to 2.0 soon as they get sense running on it there’s no certain word yet.

Edit: forgot to mention that the eris is the sam phone as the sprint hero just slightly different aesthetics

And a second edit: Supposedly HTC is coming out with another touch screen only phone for Verizon this holiday season called the Passion. Only this phone will have something like a 4.2" screen with a snapdragon 1Ghz processor compared to the 528Mhz currently running the Eris and also be running 2.0 software.

[RocketPunch]

My boss is thinking about upgrading his phone. I show him my Droid and told him about the Eris cause it is a bit cheaper. He was thinking of getting the touch pro before. I love how seemless is the gmail intergration is with the Android OS and once google doc is added…my life will be complete, LOL.