I just upgraded my phone. I had been waiting for Verizon to release an Android device as I did not want to change to T-Mobile just to have one. It finally came time and Verizon released two devices at the same time, the Motorola Droid, and the HTC Droid Eris. I was at the 1.5 year mark in my contract so I couldn’t use my New Every Two plan feature to upgrade, which gives a $100 credit towards a new device. With the rebates and New Every Two, the Motorola Droid would have cost $99 and the HTC Droid Eris would have been free. However, I believe the rebates are not staying around so by the time my “free” upgrade would have come, the price may still have been the same as I paid now. So, I went ahead and upgraded and went for the Droid Eris.
Why the Droid Eris? Was it because of price? The short answer is: no. While the Droid Eris is half the price of the Droid, when considering the total cost of ownership of the device, $100 is not that much of a savings. Considering the plan costs alone will be over $2000 for the entire term of the contract, I would not consider cost in deciding which device to get unless the cost difference is much greater. No, I made my decision based on features. So what appealed to me that made me choose the Droid Eris over the Droid? I actually have a good list of compelling reasons.
- The Droid Eris is slightly larger and slightly heavier than my old LG Dare, but is smaller and lighter than the Droid. I was not looking for a large screen to compete with the iPhone, and the Droid Eris has a larger screen than the Dare.
- The Droid Eris is almost completely touchscreen only. I’m not a fan of hard keyboards, especially if there’s moving parts involved.
- The Droid has moving parts, something extra that can fail. The hard keyboard is tucked under the device and slides out. I’ve never been a fan of the slider design.
- The Droid Eris has Sense UI, developed by HTC. Despite Droid Eris not having Android 2.0 (yet), Sense adds many features to Android 1.5 that brings it close to the feature set of Android 2.0, and in some areas, surpasses it. Also, Sense is a very nice user friendly interface, that comes with some nice widgets and features.
Of course, the Motorola Droid has its own perks over the HTC device. For example, it has more application memory, faster processor, better display, and better battery life. I’m kinda disappointed that HTC opted for the slower processor, but to be honest, for a mobile device, it’s not that bad. The processor in the Droid is up to 40% faster in synthetic benchmarks, which is no small improvement. However, when it comes to real world use, the speed is not that much more than the CPU in the Droid Eris. However, you can’t ignore the fact that not only is the CPU faster in the Droid, but also more energy efficient. I wish the HTC device had the new Cortex A8 core, but it was not to be this time around, and there are no devices in the pipeline other than the Motorola Droid for now.
So now that I have it, what do I think? This being my first ever smartphone, I’m really impressed with it. I’ve messed with Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices and was never impressed with them. Application development for Windows Mobile has been severely lacking thanks to the lack of good APIs and SDKs to develop with. Supposedly this is a worse problem for the Blackberry platform. To me, both platforms are overly complicated. However, Android feels more like a user friendly device. Really, it feels like what my Dare’s software should have been and was trying to be. This is just my overall impression, so let me get into some more specific things.
Hardware
The hardware, for the most part, feels solid. The outer shell, meaning mostly the back, is a hard rubber shell that feels and looks durable. It’s not a glossy shell so it doesn’t attract fingerprints. However, this is a shell that will easily scratch. My Dare had a similar shell finish and the glossy plastic parts really took more damage sooner than the hard rubber. The touchscreen is a capacitive type with multitouch support. The surface feels like a tempered glass, similar to my Cowon S9, which makes it fairly scratch resistant. There are two hard buttons that slightly protrude at the bottom, a small Blackberry type trackball, and 4 soft buttons that are part of the capacitive touchscreen, but not the LCD panel. There are two volume buttons on the side that slightly protrude. The camera lens is large and flush, making it very easy to wipe clean. The data and charging port is a non-standard connection, making it a requirement to buy a special cable should you need a spare or a replacement. The back of the Droid Eris is rounded a bit, making it fit well in the hand.
Verizon Customization
There is really not much to say here. Verizon is notorious for severely crippling their devices, including smartphones, which they have been known to disable GPS so that it’s required to use VZNavigator, a non-free navigation service. Surprisingly, all I found so far is a Visual Voicemail stub app, which is a small app that advertises the feature but does not implement it. Visual Voicemail is not a free service. It’s only a small annoyance, and unfortunately, can’t be removed.
Battery
Having used the LG Dare with its exceptional battery life for well over a year, I got use to being able to skip a day or two of not putting it on the charger. Unfortunately, this will not be the case for the Droid Eris. When running the base system with no apps, or anything else running, it can probably realistically get a couple of days on a charge. However, moderate use, or running some background apps, can cause extra drain. This morning, after having configured some things yesterday and letting it charge overnight, I gaged battery consumption based on what I had done so far. It appeared that my usage pattern would result in 7 to 8 hours of battery life before needing a recharge. I have since started investigating ways to reduce this without affecting my usage pattern too much.
HTC Customizations
HTC uses their own distribution of Android on their devices. Currently, their distribution is based on Android 1.5, which an Android 2.0 release coming soon. The customizations are quite nice. The pull tab at the bottom of the home screen is replaced with a 3 softkey bar providing a big Phone button in the middle, and smaller buttons on the sides for the app menu and the widget menu. Instead of a pull tab function, they are just buttons.
Another key change is the addition of 4 screens, giving HTC’s home screen a total of 7 screens, as opposed to Android’s normal 3. So far I am using 6 of the 7 screens, already surpassing the 3 that Android provides. I could probably live with 3, but having the 7 is much better. Also, for the these home screens, HTC has developed a very nice set of widgets. So far I have only found need to install one extra widget. Most of the widgets HTC provides have alternative displays, some of which vary in size. A very useful set of widgets that HTC provides are some feature toggles so that you can easily control what hardware is on and manage power use better.
One of the big feature requests for Android was the multitouch pinch zoom. This is not available in Android 1.5, but HTC implemented in many areas, giving it a feature that other non-HTC Android devices currently do not have. I’ve found this to be much more useful than the double tap zoom. In addition to this, HTC implemented a change in the way zoom works in the browser. Instead of zooming in and forcing side scrolling to read text, HTC implemented some intelligent text reformatting to limit the need for side scrolling.
There are many more customizations that HTC implemented that are discussed further on their website at http://www.htc.com/
Performance
Lets be honest, a smartphone is a computing device, albeit a small one. They are designed with full operating system stacks. In some cases, the operating system kernel is just a modified version of a kernel used on normal desktop computers. In the case of Android, the kernel is a Linux kernel, which is used mostly in servers. The primary development platform is a modified Java stack called Dalvic that is optimized for embedded platforms. The device has a full array of hardware similar to your desktop, including a CPU, sound processor, graphics processor, system memory, system storage, and expansion storage. Android, and smartphones in general, are literally personal computers that fit in the palm of your hand. Just like computers, you will find that they vary in performance, particularly when the software platform is designed to run on various hardware platforms, similar to desktop computers.
In the case of the Droid Eris, the CPU is an ARM11 core with PowerVR graphics rendering and other things integrated. The CPU runs at 528mhz, as compared to desktop CPUs running between 1.6ghz (~1600mhz) and 4ghz (~4000mhz). When seeing the speed of the CPU when compared to the desktop CPUs, it looks quite slow. In raw performance, it is slow. However, the miniaturization of the hardware makes requirements of performance low, and optimization of the software makes it run smooth. Right now, the CPU in the Droid Eris is one of the faster options available, with the 550mhz cpu in the Motorola Droid and Palm Pre being the fastest currently available. Don’t let that clock speed fool you, though. As I mentioned, the Motorola Droid CPU is up to 40% faster and more power efficient thanks to some technological advances being used in it.
So with the technical mumbo jumbo out of the way, what does it mean when it comes to actually using it? The interface feels quite smooth. The transitions between each screen is mostly smooth, with minimal hiccups. I’ve tested quite a few apps and did not feel that the slower processor was that much of a problem. In fact, I did not find any point where I felt like I absolutely needed it to be faster. One of the apps I played with was one that applied filters to images taken with the 5mp camera. It snaps the pictures very quickly, and the post processing for the effects only took a couple of seconds. I also played a couple of games that utilized the 3D hardware and they ran very smoothly.
What’s Wrong?
I can’t just throw all of my praise at this device, nor at Android, though my biggest complaint is not even the fault of neither the device, nor Android. While there’s already tens of thousands of apps on the Android Market, the quality of the apps seem to be quite lacking. So far the only app I found for Live Messenger access has a kludgy interface and an ad bar at the bottom. While I’m not entirely against ad supported free software, I will absolutely not use your app if it has ads in it because that is just something else to drain my battery, especially the ad system used in Hi MSN and other “Hi” messaging apps, since it uses location based advertising from the location based information in the device (GPS or the tower triangulation), and it rotates the ads as loaded from the internet, using extra data access.
No, I don’t fault HTC nor Android for this, I fault the slow adoption of Android and the quality of developers. I have found some useful free apps that are not ad supported, some of which is donation supported, offering a free ad free version as well as a pay ad free version.
Android Market
Android Market is a bit disappointing, and I’m not referring to the previous section. Currently, the only supported way to browse apps is through the device itself. If you go to the Market website on the Android website (http://www.android.com/market/) you get a very small taste of what’s in the market, and no way to get that information to your device. I have not seen Android Market on Android 2.0 yet, but it is suppose to be different and better than what is on Android 1.5. The Market app on 1.5 is not very well designed. I like taking the mindset of “Keep it simple, stupid!” when designing an app, but the Market app on 1.5 is too simple.
Enter AndroLib (http://www.androlib.com/). AndroLib is a web based interface to the Android Market available on your Android device. It shows the same comments and ratings so it’s not a site running completely independent of the Android Market. One of the very useful features I’ve found with AndroLib is the QR codes provided for each app. If you have a scanner on your Android device, you can scan the QR code and it can take you straight to the app on your device, making finding apps very easy. AndroLib allows you to filter by free or paid, as well. Unfortunately, many paid apps sneak in as free apps by offering demos and trials for free.
Summary
Android has come a long way, and soon the latest HTC devices will get to see more of the advancements once HTC releases their 2.0 firmware. As you will notice, I never referred to this as an iPhone killer, because in all seriousness, it is a completely different beast. Both are rich smartphone platforms and both have their perks. However, they have different audiences. The HTC Droid Eris is a solid device, and if you share my preferences in what you want in a mobile computing device, as listed above, it is a very good choice. Don’t get me wrong, the Motorola Droid is also a very good device. The CPU alone made the decision hard for me. If the HTC Droid Eris had the Cortex A8 CPU, even if it raised the price to be equal to the Motorola, but changed nothing else, the HTC would be miles ahead. The lesser performance is not so much that it’s a crippling blow. As I mentioned, don’t let the price be the deciding factor because, in the end, you are talking about at least $2300 over the span of your two year contract as opposed to at least $2400.
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