Ed Clark

The Eris is a nice phone with a nice price. It has the Sense UI, like the Hero. Many things about Sense are great, but the problem is that you can get much of the same look and feel through a combination of free and paid apps on the Market. If you want that flip-clock Weather widget, you can get the Weather Widget – Donate app for a small price. If you want more than the basic three screens from side to side, a home screen replacement app like Open Home will do the trick and then some (and can provide a “Sense-like” skin besides). Finally, most of those “Scenes” widgets from Sense—Twitter, stocks, weather, news, and so forth—are easy to find on the Market.

Some of you are thinking, “But you don’t have to pay extra for it with the Eris!” This is true. But here’s the dark side. It has a 528Mhz processor, like the G1. It comes with Cupcake while everything else is moving to Donut or Eclair. And worst of all, Verizon still hasn’t talked about when (if ever) they will deliver updates to the Eris, even though there is a clear commitment for the Hero to get Android 2.0. Could Verizon decide to differentiate the Droid by limiting what trickles down to Eris users? I have no idea. In many ways, the Eris is what the G1 should have been to start with. I like the Eris, but I want to see how Verizon treats this segment before I would recommend it. -E

Ed Clark

However, Apple fans had better hope that the executives in charge of the iPhone do care. In fact, some of what is happening now may mirror what happened to Apple in the 80s, when they went from being one of the most profitable IPOs in history to wondering how Bill Gates captured a market that should have been theirs with an inferior interface and inexpensive (in comparison) hardware.

It seems that the long-promised Android revolution was late in coming, but it’s definitely here now. Technology sites like Engadget and Gizmodo are filled with posts about new Android phones and the Android OS on their front pages, and online Android communities are sprouting up everywhere.

Late last year, G1 owners were anxiously awaiting their Cupcake updates and wondering if Google’s mobile phone initiative would ever result in a product that could truly compete with the iPhone. Many of us stuck around, but there were also plenty of folks that gave up in disgust. The complaints from that time should be familiar to long-time Android users: laggy home screens, ugly interfaces, and relatively few good apps amid a swarm of buggy apps. In fact, these problems helped along the rise of the very determined “Dream” community at xda-developers: people wanted ROMs that incorporated the rapid (and necessary) advances in the Android OS without waiting for their service providers to vet and distribute them. Users wanted Cupcake pieces right away–in many cases, because the phones were felt to be lacking without these upgrades.

Leap forward to now. New Android-based devices are being announced on an almost daily basis from a wide variety of manufacturers, including Dell and Acer along with traditional cell phone makers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and Nokia. Cupcake has been replaced by Donut, and Eclair phones are right around the corner (Droid, anyone?). If you don’t like your Android interface, you no longer have to root your phone to change the theme. Simply install a home screen alternative and change it any way you like. Finally, Android Market is not only huge, but is highly populated with professionally designed, sleek and functional applications. As the iPhone ad says, “There’s an app for that,” and those same apps can be found all over the Market. Unlike the iPhone however, the Android Market is made up of over 10,000 applications that did not require developers to go through the obscure and seemingly arbitrary approval process required by Apple. This last point is Android’s ace-in-the-hole, the one thing that Apple has never been able to deal with–much in the same way they couldn’t deal with Microsoft in the 80s. I’ll tell you why in an upcoming post. –E