The Android army is on the march with the launch of yet another handset running the Google-designed open source operating system.
HTC, the torchbearer of the Android movement, has introduced its latest phone called the Droid Eris. The phone will be available on the Verizon Wireless network starting Friday. With its $100 price tag (along with a two-year contract and a $100 mail-in rebate), the Droid Eris is also the most inexpensive Android phone on the market currently. It also directly competes with Apple’s $100 offering, the 8-GB iPhone 3G.
The Droid Eris will be the second Android phone on Verizon’s network, fulfilling a promise that the telecom carrier made a few months ago to have at least two Android handsets in its portfolio this year. Last month, Verizon introduced the Motorola Droid for $200 with a two-year contract.
The HTC Droid Eris has a 3.2-inch multitouch display, a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera, Wi-Fi and GPS capability. It will feature a full HTML browser with Flash Lite capabilities. And it’ll run HTC’s Sense user interface, first seen in HTC’s Hero phone.
Just as with Palm Pre’s webOS and Motorola’s Cliq, HTC’s Sense UI organizes the phone around contacts from different sources such as e-mail, social networking sites and the phone book. It will allow users to add widgets that aggregate information such as Twitter feeds, weather data, e-mail or calendar. The UI will also have a profile feature called “Scenes” that lets users create different customized content profiles around specific functions or times such as “Work” and “Play.”
Right now the only drawback is that the Droid Eris will not ship with Android 2.0, the latest version of the Android operating system. Instead it will run Android 1.5. But HTC says it will upgrade the phone to Android 2.0 once it has worked out all the compatibility issues between the Sense UI and the newest version of the operating system.
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