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Recently, a friend asked me to recommend one of the many new Android phones to him. The kicker was, he could not afford the Verizon Droid. Because the rest of the new phones are still an undifferentiated mess to me, I pushed him to consider which carriers he would consider. After a long discussion about carriers and a lot of price checking, he settled on Sprint and Verizon. The Hero was too expensive, so he is buying an HTC Eris. Problem solved. Right?

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