The HTC Droid is another master piece from HTC, they just get better and better with every new model.

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Attractive look, multi touch capabilities, plenty of memory space (8GB), 5 MP camera, great resolution, 3.5 mm head phone jack.

Thumbs Down:

Camera quality could have been better, no flash (for camera), no file manager, can’t store applications on external memory card.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: CDMA
Band: CDMA2000 1X 1900/800
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: Bluetooth, Google Android 1.5 Operating System, GPS, etc.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

This sexy HTC Droid Eris runs on Google Android 1.5, it has a 5 mega pixel camera with automatic focus adjustment but no flash, has GPS receiver, 3.2 inch TFT LCD display which gives 320 x 480 pixels resolution, music player – supported formats are AAC, AMR, MP3 , WAV , WMA , MIDI , AAC +, has a 3.5 mm phone jack, 8 GB Micro SDHC card. Text messaging, e-mail and HTML are all available in for messaging. Bundled along with the phone is adapter, USB cable and reference material.

Razzle Dazzle:

HTC has done it again and that too with style. This sexy chick oozes style statements from all ends and the manufacturer has spared no ends to make this phone attractive. The phone is without a physical keyboard which makes it thinner than Tilt2. The “Chin” that some HTC phones have is sacrificed.

Inside Dope:

We reviewed two HTC phones before this the HTC Hero and HTC Tilt2. Now we’ve got our hands dirty on this one, let’s see if this is better than the other HTC products that we have tested.

The phone has a 3.2 inch TFT LCD display, which is good for a smart phone.
The resolution is 320X480, large enough and gives you plenty of room to work.
We had no complaints with the display and it went well with the tone and the color of the phone.

The earlier models of this phone had three pages for menu, HTC Droid Eris has seven pages. You can store more shortcuts on the phone and all you have to do is browse through the pages to access them. Seven is a bit too much though, we would have been happy with four or five but then it all comes down to personal choices, you can increase or decrease them according to your needs.

The menus provide you short cut to your most frequently used applications, so that you don’t have to always go in and keep clicking on buttons till you reach your destination.

HTC Droid Eris is the cheapest among Android phones.

The phone also has proximity sensor which locks the phone and protects it from accidental hits when you place it close to your ear for making a call. There was no proximity sensor HTC Hero, but it was included in HTC Tilt2. We were happy to see this feature included in this model. The proximity sensor first featured in the Apple iPhone and now every phone has it.

HTC Droid Eris is a touch screen phone and you can directly surf through the photos on the phone by flicking your fingers through it. The multi touch feature which we saw in HTC Hero is here too, it was not there in Tilt2.

The multi touch function, as the name suggests registers more than one touch at a time. This is fun while playing games and also during photos. You can “pinch” the photos, stretch them, or make them look small. The “pinch” feature, which was first seen in Apple iPhone, is now ubiquitous. A lot of iPhone’s features have been incorporated onto this phone, and this too doesn’t look like some cheap imitation. HTC products are in class of their own.

The phone has built in accelerometer too which changes the display when you hold it straight or sideways. The transition was a bit smoother than the earlier models but little lag still exists. However, accelerometer is not available for all applications.

Now let’s discuss the keyboard. There is no physical keyboard and the virtual keyboard is all you get. Now, we aren’t exactly fans of the tiny keyboard that you get in the phone. The keys are small and give a hard time to the fingers and if there is no physical keyboard then it adds to the miseries because you have to use a virtual one.

HTC Tilt has a physical keyboard and this one doesn’t. At the user end, a phone without a keyboard gives you a slimmer phone. The keyboard is quite good and the white color of the keys and the blue background looks quite nice. Keyboard in landscape is better than the portrait mode because of the broadness.

Below the display you get four touch sensitive buttons – Home, Menu, Back and Zoom Sprint and Hero didn’t have such buttons. Some times we had problems with these keys, but sometimes they seemed to be working fine. We had to tap the home button a number of times on certain occasions. The only physical buttons you get on the phone are at the bottom- Call and Call End also you get a trackball between these two buttons.

On the back of the phone is the Camera which is a 5 Mega pixel, Sprint had 5 megapixel too and Hero featured a 3.2 mega pixel camera. The camera is lamentable and there is nothing great about it. HTC was never good in cameras; the photos are not as sharp as expected from a 5 MP camera. We have seen better cameras phones than this. But camera controls are simple and easy to use. You use the trackball to click pictures so make sure you hold the phone steadily or you will come up with blurred pictures. The phone doesn’t have a dedicated key for clicking.

The camera has four image resolution sizes, four white-balance settings, a brightness meter, spot metering, a digital zoom, a self-timer, auto focus, a flicker adjustment, four ISO settings, three color effects, etc. Camera has automatic photo adjustment but no flash and no mirror. The video quality was not that good but the controls were simple and easy to use.

The inbuilt music player is similar to other Android based phones. Host of formats like MP3, AAC, AMR-NB, WAV, MIDI, and Windows Media Audio 9 format are supported. Functions like shuffle, repeat, playlists are all there. There is no PC syncing software like the ones we get in Apple iPhones (iTunes) so you have to drag and drop files in the phone. The plus side is that you don’t have to install the software and can transfer files from any computer through a USB cable. But managing software is efficient in managing music files and so some people prefer it to drag and drop interface. 3.5 mm head phone jack is given so you can plug your own choice of headphones.

You can buy applications from Android software but you can’t store them on external memory card. On the phone you get 512 MB ROM and 288 MB ROM. HTC makes sure you never run out of space for storing music and photos by giving you an 8 GB card. Memory card is beneath the battery in the phone and not hot swappable. The card can be used as USB mass storage.

HTC is a smart phone and internet is the main reason for purchasing a smart phone. The internet, messaging and e-mailing is all good in this phone and has plenty of options. Being an Android phone you get Google Maps, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Calendar and Google Search with Voice.

Other features worth mentioning are Bluetooth, voice dialing, Verizon visual voice mail, calculator, calendar, speakerphone, alarm clock, Wi-Fi, PC syncing, USB mass storage, and a voice recorder.

Contacts storage is limited to phone memory, just like applications. You can’t store contacts on the external card. Functions such as photo tagging and individual ring tones are supported.

The phone is powered by 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7600 processor, the same which the Hero had, and its make sure that you will be able to access applications fast.

Battery life is rated is 3.5 hours of talk time but a phone  with such applications and capabilities it is sure to run out soon, you will have to carry a charger around if you are staying out for long.

Call quality was good on this phone and we had no issues with it. The quality of the call drops when you put it down to speaker phone but this can be seen in lots of phones since a speaker phone attracts a lot of background noise. You can connect a Bluetooth headset for making calls.

Nitty Gritty:

The phone gives us very little to complain about. Apart from a bad photo quality, this phone has nothing that will decide you against buying it. HTC has made this phone better in many departments we must say, this one is the best HTC product to date.

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