HTC Eris: My New Friend

So i realize that this blog is meant to be photography based, but I have been pretty smitten with my newest camera option. That's right folks, I Got a new Phone! Everyone, meet the HTC Eris.

Isn't it beautiful? I must admit, I have never been much of a gadgety-toy fan. My phones up to this point have been practical. I had a bare-bones motorola to start my cell career off with almost six years ago, probably wouldn't have even gotten a cell phone in the first place if my parents hadn't realized that just giving me a phone card meant that it was highly unlikely that they would ever hear from me while i was living away at college. So one day i found myself at verizon wireless with my parents, and I ended up walking away with a phone.

Two years later, the texting phenomenon actually hit me. My first Motorola was just b&w basic digital cell phone, didn't even receive picture messages (although it did have greek letter options, which i have not found in any phone i have owned since...)

Anyway, the point of my reminiscence is to illustrate that I haven't ever bothered to have the top-of-the-line doo-dads. I just haven't ever really seen any need for the extra bells and whistles. My last upgrade opted for the significance of a camera over texting or anything else and i got the Samsung Flipshot. Great phone. I probably could have happily kept it for another 9 months before i left for Ireland, but when i went into the Verizon store last week, I was quite taken with the Eris.

I have to confess that I am a sucker for a cleverly designed ad. When i was entertaining the notion of getting a new phone, HTC wasn't really even in my thoughts. I love this commercial though.

I don't have much experience with smart phones, aside from dinking around with friends' phones, my main basis of comparison for a multi-function gadget is the iPod Touch. Every touch-screen smart phone i have had the opportunity to test out have always seemed rather bulky. The Blackberry storm seamed pretty beastly when i first saw one. Kind of bulky and cumbersome. Then there's the Motorola Droid, which i have heard is a fabulous phone, and it is quite fun to play with, but it's even worse. Kind of brick-like, it's function didn't really trump its design for me. Maybe it's more appropriately a guy phone, I don't know. I could just be too much of a girl and want a sleek and refined design. There's just something kind of back-to-the-future vintage to Motorola's Droid I am not entirely on board with.

So the Eris is a sleek phone. I did the no-no of getting a case for it too. I know that that's a unfashionable for the smart-phone addicts out there, detracting from the purity of the phone. I was surprised by how nice it looks. For one thing, i'm a fan of the color, but the back-hug design doesn't really thicken the phone, and I rather like it.

The screen is slightly smaller than the iPod touch and responds just as well, although I have noticed that there is a little bit of a delay on executing commands. It's not ridiculously slow, I'm just used to the iPod Touch being quicker. Typing on the keyboard is about what you would expect as well, although it's pretty sophisticated. I may just have slightly fat fingers, so using the keyboard in portrait-mode is a little more complicated and slow than if i do it in landscape. I also sometimes get a little ahead of myself and skip letters. I imagine it just goes with the territory. The spell-check options are pretty great though, I just need to focus on proof-reading what i write.

I love that you can sync up your phonebook contact list to facebook contacts, but I don't enjoy that because i have a number of friends put into the phone under various misnomers, they didn't automatically get identified by my phone. I have had to go through my contact list, syncing them manually which gets a little tedious. I still haven't finished that task...

One thing that was slightly annoying when i first got the phone, the VZW rep who was helping me took it upon herself to setup my Gmail, Twitter and Facebook accounts for the phone. I am not entirely sure why that was deemed necessary at the time because I had to go back and redo it anyway. Then it took a solid 3 days for my Gmail to finally start syncing to the 'desktop'? client (i don't know what the proper term for that is). Randomly it just popped up with notifications today after three days of telling me that my inbox was empty even though i have at least 80 messages in it, so I don't know what she did. If you, good reader, go in to get this phone and they start asking you for your logins and passwords, just tell them you'd be more comfortable doing that on your own, because I'm pretty sure it didn't do anything for me.

I've tried three different Twitter clients (why there have to be so damned many of those things is beyond me) so far. Peep is awful, and it was the standard program that was setup on my phone for twitter. Just a bad design, slow in responding pretty much requiring fully manual refreshing, and overall just a bad application. Don't bother with it. Twidroid was the next one i tried out, and it had a really high rating, and is a pretty great application. I love that when it refreshes the tweets, rather than sending you to the top of the list, it keeps you at your current point so you can just scroll up. Seesmic, which is the last one i tried out, doesn't do that, but that's pretty much my only complaint for it. The "reply all" option is amazing and i think it should be borrowed by a number of clients for computer since i'm constantly copying and pasting extra recipients. That's what i've been using pretty much exclusively now and am happy with it. I'm open to other clients if someone has a suggestion that is pretty awesome.

Now in the true spirit of this blog, on to the photo stuff!

The 5M camera is great. Not going to say it's any better than my 3M on the Flipshot, and I feel like the lack of a flash definitely limits its low-light capabilities. I have also noticed some weird streaking going on in the pixels, especially in the low-light photos. May only be visible to me because i'm looking for flaws or nagging little issues, but it's pretty minimal and may be contributed partially to a dirty lens.

I love that i can tap a part of the image i am trying to photograph and focus manually on it that way. I had also managed to get the shutter to release with a tap on the screen at one point but haven't managed to get the camera to repeat the fete recently. Anyway, Overall, quite pleased with the camera's basic effects. It captures images quite well. Kind of curious if the lens-adapters for the iPhone would function on it. Something to try out later on down the road.

Then i added the FxCamera application and things kept getting more amusing. For a few months now, I have been envious of the iPhone's fun camera applications that could manipulate the photos the phone took to look like toy-camera images and other amusing things I could easily manipulate my own digital photos into looking like on photoshop. I'm so happy that i can be extra lazy now and just make my phone automatically do it for me. Here's a sampling of the options and how i feel about them:

The Toy Camera Filter- This is my favorite one. I guess i love the vignetting and the faux-cross-processed look of them. They just feel so delightfully fake and hipster, but i like it anyway. I'm probably being the biggest hypocrite for loving this, but I guarantee that i will shoot a number of photos in this filter and not regret it one bit. There are a number of different qualities within the option too. such as two different tonalities of cross-processing (for those who are unfamiliar with this term, It's when you process film products in an alternate chemical process, such as processing a positive, or slide, film with a negative producing chemical or vice versa. It alters the color properties of the film) and other different variations of warmth in the tonal range of the images. I guess I am most amused by the fact that it takes an image that is extremely lo-fi for digital photography and emulating a lo-fi medium in film photography. It just makes me happy (even though it is probably kitschy)

The Mirror-Image Filter- Yea, i know, it's a really lame technique that you don't even really want to use in photobooth, but it's kind of fun to have in the phone... maybe?

Polaroid- Kind of the same story as the toy camera, it's pretty silly to have this option available on a cameraphone, but i am amused by it anyway and will more than likely use it a lot. I like that the color qualities are altered by this filter as well. It kind of ghetto-fies the color warmth as though it were actually shot in the polaroid camera.

now a REALLY cool thing for them to include would be to allow you to draw on the picture like you can with a real polaroid while it's developing. At least I would be up for having that option

Just saying...

Fish-eye Lens- I have to admit, I have never really had much interest in the fish-eye lens thing. I have used one before, and while it is entertaining, you get done with one roll of film, process it, make a few prints and say to yourself, "well that was fun, now for something that isn't so gimmicky."

I think it would be amusing to couple it with some color-alteration, such as going greyscale or sepia... the pineapple isn't probably the best subject to use as an example.

I also don't like that it's pretty obvious where the pixels are stretched in the apex of the bubble. oh well though. May come in handy at some point. you never know.

Andy Warhol-esque- This is neither the time nor the place to have my rant about how kitschy and lame i think the 'warhol' images (and the man's work itself altogether) are, so i'll just say that I'm not particularly impressed with the execution of this filter in the first place. I don't even use the option on photobooth, so it's really not my bag. Maybe someone out there is dying to have this option at the ready for that chance encounter, I just don't happen to be one of them.

I guess that's kind of it for now. I am looking for other applications for the phone, just to dink around with, so if anyone stumbles upon something brilliant and clever or wants to challenge me to use something else on the phone, please shout it out. I'm up for it.