The HTC Droid Eris is available with Google Android 1.5 (which can be upgraded to Android 2.1) and is one of the best mobile phones available with the Google operating system. It is a nice and slim Smartphone device.

Design and features

The design of the device is similar to most of the HTC devices with smooth and rounded corners. It measures 4.45 inches x 2.19 inches x 0.51 inches and weighs 4.23 ounces. That’s slim enough to fit in to your pocket. The device has a proximity sensor that will help the screen to turn off when you are on a call to avoid an accidental press on the touch screen.

The touch screen measures 3.2 inches with 320 x 480 resolutions and displays the image clearly and sharply. The text is easily readable and the main menu items are displayed in the form of icons. The multi-touch facility of the touch screen is very useful, especially while using the photo gallery and Web browsers. There are four touch-sensitive navigation buttons below the screen Home, Menu, Back and Zoom.   The feature called Scenes, helps you to change the theme of the display.

The device has a 3.5mm headphone jack, a mini USB port, good volume on the speakers, and a micro SD extension socket with an 8GB card. There are plenty of e-mail and messaging options, and all internet accounts can be managed efficiently. Quick Office and PDF viewer help you to manage different types of files.   It provides many useful applications like Teeter game, weather feeds and stocks. You can upgrade your device with a lot of applications through the Android site. It has a 5 mp camera with video recording, and supports WAV, MIDI, WMA 9, MP3, AMR-NB and AAC file formats. As far as th networking is concerned, It has 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. It has up to 373 hours of standby and up to 460 hours of battery life. It is designed in the Candy bar style and available from Verizon Wireless in the US.

The Good

The in-built accelerometer will change the screen orientation from portrait to landscape automatically when you rotate the device.   The touch screen keyboard also changes according to the position of the phone. The buttons of the onscreen keyboard with white background are big enough so that typing is easy, especially when the device is in landscape position.

The Bad

There are not many obvious drawbacks of the device. However, the device does contain some problems related to browsing. Moreover, the automatic change of page orientation function does not work in all the applications. During browsing, the user has to bring-up the browser menu every time to use the basic navigation functions such as forward and back.

Overall, the device is a good Smartphone alternative to Apple’s iPhone.