HTC Droid Eris / Reviews

This phone has a lot of promise. The Android operating system gives you tight integration with Google Voice (which can automatically make your international calls for you for pennies per minute) and Google Mail. Using "Mytracks" with the GPS is fun and useful. And, well, it's cool having internet in your pocket. But:

- every time I booted the phone, Google Voice would crash.

- the HTC input program, that lets you type text into the phone, would crash in the middle of emails and not let my type until I rebooted.

- many of my conversations were badly muffled. I googled this and followed instructions on switching to "EVRC-B" form "EVRC" (these are algorithms used to encode voices). The quality improved, but people have reported not being able to make calls from some parts of the country after making this switch. Without it, the quality was patchy for me (Boston area). I didn't want to have to play with internal network settings to get the phone to work.

- The phone dropped calls, giving a "Signal Faded" message. I checked with Verizon, and this wasn't recorded by the network as a dropped call - therefore it was the phone. I never had this problem with my cheap flip phone.

- I couldn't play Youtube videos through the Youtube player.

- the phone was laggy. This means you're typing and letters aren't appearing, then appear all at once. Or it means that you're looking through your call history to make a call, press on a number, and call the wrong number because it took 5 seconds to update the list display.

- with moderate usage the battery lasts about 6 hours. This is usually fine if you're between office, home and car chargers, but sometimes it's not enough. I was always turning parts of the phone off to save battery life.

- video quality is poor, particularly the sound, compared to an iPhone (which admittedly is more expensive).

In short, you get what you pay for. This phone is really cheap - but the savings are small compared to the cost of a 2-year plan, and I'd recommend getting the best phone you can to take advantage of the investment that plan represents.

Read original review at Amazon.