HTC Droid Eris

Call Quality

Call quality: We found call quality on the HTC DROID Eris relatively clear: we could hear callers loud and clear and callers had no problem hearing us as well. It’s easy enough to adjust the cell phone’s volume with the corresponding buttons on the side of the DROID Eris. However, we should mention that we do have a few quibbles with the cell phone application. Often during calls if we held the cell phone too close to the face, we would either accidentally hang up or launch the speakerphone. Additionally, there was no degradation in call quality when we used a Bluetooth headset, and we could still hear callers in a noisy environment, such as a crowded store.

Audio quality: The playback of music on the HTC DROID Eris’ speaker is quite impressive; songs sounded loud, but not distorted or too tinny. If you turn the smartphone display side down on a table it’s even louder. The HTC DROID Eris sports a 3.5mm headset jack so you can use your own high-end headphones to listen to music stored on the DROID, however, unless they are also cell phone compatible you won’t be able to take calls. Additionally, the HTC DROID Eris supports stereo Bluetooth so if you prefer to go wireless, you can always listen to tunes via an optional Bluetooth-enabled stereo headset.

Ease of Use

Menu/phone book: The HTC DROID Eris runs Google Android OS 1.5, so it’s not the same as the version found on the Motorola DROID, which is version 2.0. The Google user interface is fairly straightforward and icon friendly. To access the cell phone’s applications simply select the up arrow key and they’ll appear. Here are a few things to note about navigation. If you’re in a screen and want to go back to the previous screen simply press the back arrow. If you want to exit a program simply press the button with a picture of a house, since you can’t manually quit applications running on the HTD DROID Eris. For the most part, this is not an issue. Whenever you’re in an application and want to do more press the Menu key and a set of options will appear.

The Google Android OS is really all about having all your contact information in one spot and constantly synched. When we say all your contact information we mean all – including social networking sites, multiple e-mail accounts, messaging (messaging is threaded – so you can see a complete text message conversation in one view), and even photo services where you may have accounts created. You can add all pertinent account information easily when you set up the device. If you want to sync with your computer simply connect it via the included USB synching cable and it will appear as an additional drive on your desktop, making it easy to drag and drop files from a computer to the cell phone’s MicroSD card. Additionally, the HTC DROID Eris comes with HTC Sense, which offers seven screens to customize and a slue of widgets to help customize the cell phone. One of the more interesting included apps from HTC is Footprints, it allows you to take a picture of a place get all the information available about it from the web including a map and you can add a note to it. The idea is that whenever you go back to that place you can revisit or just share it with friends.

Messaging: The HTC DROID Eris can handle multiple e-mail accounts either corporate e-mail or web-based e-mail. Setting up an e-mail account couldn’t be easier and one of the screens has an HTC prompt on how to get e-mail. It’s just a matter of knowing user name and password. The smartphone does the rest. We did find the mail feature is more of a nice way to stay up to date on incoming mail, but that’s about it. For example, if you delete a mail on the cell phone it doesn’t delete in the account and vice-versa (at least that’s the case for the POP3 e-mail), so there’s a lot of repetition.

Camera/video: The HTC DROID Eris has a 5-megapixel camera with AutoFocus, but lacks a flash and a tiny mirror for snapping self portraits. Overall, picture quality is acceptable and we’re happy to report it has a fairly fast shutter. However, we wouldn’t use it to capture moments at say a basketball game. Colors are a little washed out and details could be a bit sharper. Once you snap a picture, you can save it, trash it, or share it to a multitude of options including Flickr, Facebook, and various messaging options. There are a quite a few camera settings: you can adjust White Balance, ISO Settings, Metering, Picture Size, Picture Quality, GeoTagging, and Color Effects (Normal, Grayscale, Negative, or Sepia).

Additionally, you can view and shoot videos on the cell phone. Shooting videos is pretty easy and the quality is acceptable. While it’s a nice feature to have, you’re probably going to enjoy watching videos you download or stream from the Internet over a WiFi connection.

Music: As noted, the HTC DROID Eris has a music player. You can listen to songs stored in MP3, AAC (Apple’s audio format), and WMA (Microsoft’s audio format) formats. There aren’t many music-centric features included in the player, but it has the ones we’ve come to expect: Repeat, Shuffle, and Playlists (you can even create them on the fly – nice!). Plus, you can save tunes stored in your cell phone as a ringtone The DROID Eris comes with a 8GB MicroSD card, so you will have plenty of room to store music on this cell phone. Besides adding your own music to the cell phone, you can also purchase songs from the Amazon MP3 store application pre-installed on the DROID Eris. Additionally, there are quite a few free music applications that you can download from the Marketplace such as Pandora.

Connectivity/Bluetooth/WiFi:You can do a lot with Bluetooth on this cell phone. Besides easily being able to connect to a Bluetooth headset (we found call quality was decent when we used the Motorola T505). The HTC DROID Eris also has built-in WiFi, so you can use this smartphone to log onto available WiFi networks to surf the Web or send/receive e-mail. It’s a nice feature and it just takes moments to set up. The only thing you need to know is the WiFi network you want to use and password if needed. We should note surfing the Web on the DROID Eris wasn’t bad, but WiFi was often faster. Web pages loaded quickly and you could scroll around them and zoom in/out via the trackball, but it’s still not the ideal viewing experience on a cell phone. In fact, there’s not much you can’t do with the HTC DROID Eris when connected to a WiFi network, except make a call.

Design

Look and feel: The HTC DROID Eris is one streamlined smartphone: it literally only has two buttons and those are for controlling the volume keys. There’s also a 3.5mm headset jack and microUSB port both outlined in silver. The DROID Eris has a black rubberized backing giving it a sturdy feel, while the front is essentially a large touchscreen display. The display is vibrant, bright, and visible in direct sunlight. It also attracts a fair share of face grease and fingerprints. When the display is not illuminated that’s when you can really the see the marks, otherwise it’s not that visible. To be fair, this is an issue with most touchscreen cell phones currently available. If you want to swap out the microSD card you’ll need to remove the back cover. The slot is located on the side of the cell phone, so you won’t have to remove the battery. A definite plus.

The front of the DROID Eris has just two keys one to make calls and one to end calls/power the cell phone. The two keys flank the white scroll wheel – similar to the scroll wheel found on the BlackBerry Pearl. Above those keys at the base of the display are four touch-sensitive icons, which are all you’ll need to navigation. They are home, Menu, Back, and Search. The icons are self-explanatory; although we should note that you can press the search to search on anything in any application or screen.

Keypad:The HTC DROID Eris is a touchscreen cell phone and as such it only has a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard, which is actually HTC’s own touch keyboard, not the one found within the Google Android operating system. We were quite impressed with the amount of times we tapped the correct letter on first try and how well it learned the words we used on a regular basis. We should note that even if you have larger fingers, you probably won’t have much trouble using the keyboard.

Battery Life

We found battery life on the HTC DROID Eris acceptable, but not stellar. If you use the cell phone frequently to make calls, listen to music, as well as send/receive text messages and e-mail, this smartphone will probably last about day and a half before needing to recharge. However, if you consider the DROID Eris primarily a cell phone and less of a messaging device, you’ll get about two to three days of battery life from it. We should note that depending on what applications you download to the smartphone can drain battery life faster, practically cutting battery life in half.