The Motorola DROID is released! Does it live up to all the hype? Let us just simply say: NO. Continue reading to find out why we don’t think it’s a good device. We also checked out a HTC DROID ERIS, a device that we think is far superior to the DROID.

Please excuse the quality of the images. They were taken with a iPhone 3G.

Alright, so you’ve all probably seen those DROID Does/iDon’t commercials. These commercials primarily aimed towards the Apple iPhone. Even with all the restrictions that the iPhone have (unless jailbroken), it is just a far more user-friendly device. We will be comparing the DROID to the iPhone throughout this post.

The DROID has a slightly larger screen. The edges of the device aren’t very rounded. This isn’t very comfortable to hold for a very long time, at all. It is bar far the most unattractive device we’ve ever seen as well. Sliding phones seem to be fading away from the technology world. Everything is going virtual. Having a physical keyboard may be good to some, but to those of us who look toward the future, we left those things behind.

There are 4 touch-sensitive buttons on the bottom that goes back, brings up the menu, goes to the home screen, or goes to the search bar. The performance of the DROID isn’t very good. When sliding between home screens, it’s very laggy (frame rate wise). Scrolling various menus and web pages is also choppy. Web pages load fairly fast over 3G. It did load web pages faster than our iPhone 3G, but it is said that the iPhone 3GS is considerably faster at loading web pages than the DROID.

On the other side of the device, you’ll notice that the DROID has a 5 megapixel camera with a 2 LED flash module. We weren’t able to take any images or shoot any video because the DROID needs a memory card to record the media to. The actual camera application works a lot like the iPhone’s camera app.

This is the home screen. It’s not very attractive. Application open within a second, which is always good. As far as we know, you can’t add widgets to the home screen, which is a major letdown on a device that is supposed to be the iPhone killer.

The Motorola DROID is the first Android-based phone with Android 2.0. New with 2.0 is Google’s very own turn-by-turn navigation application. It works very quickly, and its interface is better than any navigation app available for the iPhone. The voice instructions are very clear and precise.

So, let’s explain why we believe this device is bad. Scrolling through web pages and menus aren’t very smooth at all. The overall interface is very plain and boring. Not only is the interface boring, but the device itself is boring. It’s rather thick (our iPhone 3G with a iSkin Fuze case is about the same thickness), and very unattractive. We just believe that this isn’t a very advanced device. It isn’t very enjoyable to use. Overall, the DROID doesn’t live up to all the DROID hype at all. Not to mention the DROID doesn’t even have multitouch support. The European version of this phone does, so maybe there will be some sort of hack to enable this in the American version of the DROID.

A few phones over is the HTC DROID ERIS, another Android-based phone. Whats different about this device is that it has HTC’s “Sense UI”, an all new modified home screen with various widgets. Switching between these home screens is extremely smooth. There is a huge assortment of widgets, including Twitter, Facebook, and email.

The device itself is FAR more attractive than the DROID. There isn’t a slider, which we think is great. There is a little trackball at the bottom of the phone that can be used to scroll between menus and select things (by pushing down on it). There’s also a call & end/power button. The ERIS is a tad bit thinner than the DROID, and also have a much more comfortable feel to it.

The interface on this phone is quite a bit different compared to the DROID. The home screen is much more user friendly and informative, feature a nice big clock and weather information. You get widgets, where you can view things like email and SMS/MMS messages at a glance. Applications like the phone does have a different looking interface (buttons/colors, etc). Everything also seems considerably smoother than the DROID. The DROID is a little bit faster at loading applications. The ERIS is slightly cheaper, and has a 8GB MicroSD card thrown in the box.

We also looked at a BlackBerry Storm 2, but nobody really cares about those.

Everyone has their own opinion. This post contains ours. The DROID is a huge letdown. The HTC DROID ERIS is a much better phone. It has a smaller screen, and doesn’t incorporate a physical keyboard, but it is a better device everywhere else. We would like to know what you think about these 2 devices. Leave a comment to this post and we’ll probably reply to it.