Review: HTC's DROID Eris and Hero

The thing that hits anyone in the eye is the thinner version of both of these phones as HTC Hero is quite a heavy phone. The Eris, doesn’t have any hardware controls now for home, menu, back, and search that the two Hero labeled smartphones have. They all of these are equipped with a hardware trackball for basic direction control, whenever needed. Now there are some touch sensitive controls on the DROID Eris which makes the device harder to unlock, since you can't just hit the hardware menu key twice, so is not a major plus point of these phones. The worst thing is that it also makes the phone overall harder to use - especially in places where you can’t see much.

One thing common between DROID Eris Motorola DROID is that the touch sensitive keys don't light up until the screen is activated, and they don't stay lighted for all that long in general. This thing becomes bit of a problem especially in dark areas. These are the major touch controls differences between the phones, apart from these the 3 devices share the same basic hardware, including very nice 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen(INFO) displays with half VGA (320 x 480 pixel) resolution. The displays, and the user interface that runs on them, are very responsive and easy to use.
The rest of the hardware on the Sprint Hero and the Verizon DROID Eris is very solid to say the least. They both come with a miniUSB connector for charging and USB connections to a PC, and each have a regular 3.5mm headphone jack for use with regular headphones.

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