HTC Droid Eris (Verizon Wireless)

Pros: The Eris is all-in-all a fantastic phone. I bought the Droid first but I traded it for the Eris after a week because of the difficult Droid keyboard and boxy, heavy, clunky design. It didn't fit in my pocket. The Eris addressed all of those issues.

Cons: The battery life is really the only issue with this phone.

Summary: The battery life is a problem out of the box, but it can be largely overcome by turning off transmitters when not in use. Of course, that defeats the "push" functionality that everyone wants in a smart phone. I want emails, IMs, Facebook friend updates, and text messages to pop up on my phone just like a phone call "pops up". I imagine HTC is working on both battery updates and software fixes to address this. A software suggestion: Give the user more control over the frequency of each "push" update. For example, let me tell the phone to turn on the 3G and check for text messages every half hour, then turn the 3G back off. I may not need the 3G to be on all the time. Another suggestion: Turn on and off the GPS transmitter automatically when a using application (like Google Maps) is opened and closed.

Again, this is a super phone with a great operating system that I will be happy with for a long time (well, at least until the end of my two year contract). But a heavy user will want to have a charger in the car and in the office.