Completely unscientific phone review

We got new phones on Friday night, Hubby got a Droid Eris, I got the Motorola Devour.  Sunday afternoon I exchanged the Devour for an Eris and I like it much better.  This was what I didn't like with the Devour:

Weight and form factor

The Devour has an aluminium casing that weighs more than any phone I have ever encountered.  The corners are sharp, and it's a blocky thing that just barely fit in the cell phone pocket of my handbag.  It felt cumbersome, and the buttons outside the case felt flimsy.

Moto Blur

This application had definite potential, I liked that it could aggregate updates from Facebook and Twitter.  But it has a huge drawback: it gives you updates from EVERYONE.  You can't hide anyone on your contact list. It ignores the friends lists you set up in Facebook.  I turned this off within an hour of getting the phone because it was too annoying to use.  I got the effect I wanted by using a custom contacts list in the phone book.  People have complained about this from when it first arrived in the Motorola Cliq, and nothing has been done to fix it.

Keyboard

I've never had a phone with a keyboard before, and I knew I didn't like soft keyboards.  The Devour keyboard is a slide out affair and it felt stiff and difficult to use.  It made my wrist hurt.  It was bad enough I was willing to take the soft keyboard for the 2 years of our contract to get away from it, regardless of my hatred for soft keyboards.

Battery life

Maybe I had a bad battery, but I never expected the Devour to eat through a full charge in less than 24 hours.  I'm used to charging my phone once a week or less.  I understand smartphones use more juice than dumbphones, but that seemed excessive.

I did like the Devour's universal inbox that showed text messages, my Yahoo Mail account, Facebook mail messages, and my Gmail inbox.  Having to associate all my Twitter contacts with the same people in Facebook was tedious, but getting all their status updates on the same page was nice.  The construction of the thing was what really killed it for me.

With the Eris, I don't like that I had to do a factory reset to make it delete my Flickr account.  And that the reset didn't work, it just logged me out.  The soft keyboard is not as horrible as I thought, though you do have to watch its "helpful" corrections of your typing.  I can't get it to connect to my Yahoo account, and it insisted on giving me weather for New York even after I deleted New York several times over.  But even with all that, the Eris is a far better phone for me.

Also, the Eris is named after the Greek goddess of chaos and dischord, and the rather nice cardigan I'm so close to finishing.