I spent part of the last week playing with the new HTC Eris phone. It's the other Droid offered by Verizon. This phone has the potential to be a real challenger to the iPhone. This first iteration is weak on processing power, making many of the application noticeably slow to run. Of course, the same was true of the original iPhone. The Eris feels good in your hand and its size is right for slipping into a pocket. I found most of my favorite iPhone apps or close equivalents in the Android Marketplace. The battery couldn't last half a day when I had the push mail turned on, but with manual fetching I was able to get more than a full day. I can also swap out the battery, unlike the iPhone. I can also get the phone on networks other than AT&T. Hooray!

Here's the real drawback. The good folks at Apple put a lot of time and attention into the experience we have when using their devices. The iPhone's interface shows the result of that attention. I found it difficult to figure out how to do common things on the Eris. Not that it took me a huge amount of time to figure them out, but I had to engage brain cells to do it. And I'll be annoyed each time I have to do it in the future because it could have been designed so I didn't have to think about it.

The phone is a great attempt at imitating the iPhone. If you hate AT&T just a little bit more than I do, then this is the best option available to you...until next summer.