Verizon Droid

It’s apparently not common knowledge that there are actually two Droids: the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris. They’re both Android-based phones, but significantly different in form and firmware. The Motorola Droid is a slider phone with a large screen and a physical keyboard that runs Android 2.0. The Droid Eris is cheaper, with a slower CPU and no dedicated GPU, but it’s also far slicker than the Motorola Droid.
The initial layout of Android 1.5 on the Eris is quite pleasing. The home screen offers a customizable selection of application shortcuts and a heads-up display with the current time and weather. Off to each side of this screen are three “desktop” screens that can be populated with widgets, application shortcuts, or any mixture of the two. The standard widgets, including an e-mail quick-viewer and a text messaging app, are extremely handy. The e-mail quick-viewer, for example, shows the last received e-mail and lets you flip back in your inbox easily, without opening the full e-mail client.

On the other desktop screens, you can easily drop in launchers for any application, additional widgets such as the one for Google search, and shortcuts to common tasks such as turning Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on or off. Once you grok the concept of having multiple configurable screens rather than, say, the iPhone’s launcher-only screens, you’ll appreciate the wealth of possibilities.

Read the full review at Infoworld

Remember the talk in early October about a third Verizon Android smartphone from a small company and certified through the carrier’s Open Development program? The HTC DROID Eris and Motorola DROID pushed that mystery device to the back of our minds, but an FCC filing has seemingly revealed the device as the Saygus VPhone V1, another sliding form-factor with a 3.5-inch 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, 624MHz Marvell PXA310 processor and a 5-megapixel autofocus camera.
Other specs include 512MB of ROM and 256MB of RAM, a microSD slot, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS; there’s also an accelerometer and digital compass. An FM radio is a welcome addition, but we wish Saygus had found room for a proper 3.5mm headphone jack; still, the mini USB port can act as USB Host for peripherals, and there’s a front-facing camera for video calls.

If there was any doubt about this headed to Verizon’s CDMA EVDO Rev.A network, the fact that Saygus’ own site mentions the same “third mystery device” article seems to clinch it. No word on when we might see it arrive, but given the FCC clearance and Verizon’s current full-steam-ahead adoption of Android the “early 2010″ predictions seem reasonably probable.

[source: SlashGear]

Leaked documents shed more light on the HTC Droid Eris: the HTC Droid Eris scheduled for release on November 6th and listed for $99 (after $10 mail-in rebate is applied) on a 2-year contract. Single year contract price is pegged at $269.99 while full retail price stands at $469.99. As far as features go, in addition to its Android 1.5 OS and 528MHz Qualcomm processor, it will come with a 3.25-inch 320×480 HVGA 262K color display, 5-megapixel autofocus camera, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, Push Gmail and Exchange support, Visual Voicemail, EV-Do Rev. A connectivity, 3.5mm jack, and an 8GB microSD card (supports up to 16GB) as part of the package.

HTC Eris Droid specs

[source: PMP today]