Confirmed: HTC Droid Eris will not get Froyo

We've suspected it for months, and I can now confirm what we'd feared all along: Verizon's HTC Droid Eris will not receive the Android 2.2 upgrade.

The Eris, launched alongside the original Motorola Droid last fall, took a back seat to higher profile devices from day 1. Verizon did update the Eris to Android 2.1 this past May -- it had originally shipped with 1.5 -- but the carrier has told me without a shred of doubt that the phone will not be bumped up to Froyo.

HTC Droid Eris: No Froyo

Droid Eris

Things started looking particularly bleak for the Droid Eris when Verizon stopped selling the device earlier this summer. It appears the phone's discontinuation is at least part of the company's reason for denying it the Froyo upgrade.

"We will not be updating the Eris to 2.2 because our device portfolio evolves and changes constantly," a spokesperson tells me.

Disappointing news, Eris owners -- sorry to be the bearer of it. On the up side, at least your phone isn't oddly locked to Bing like Verizon's latest Android offering, the Samsung Fascinate. We can only hope the carrier's questionable decisions will end here.

More DroidX Custom Roms Starting to Emerge

For those who follow the android world, you all know that Motorola decided to make it 
impossibleharder for custom ROM developers to create custom ROMS for the Droid X as well as making itimpossible slightly more difficult than normal to root the phone. Well since then the phone has been rooted, and a recovery method was put in place to allow people to flash new ROMS and test the vulnerabilities of the Droid X without fear of permanently damaging the phone. This recovery fallback has allowed ROM development to speed up a little bit and now the first totally custom ROMS are available for people to flash (they are froyo2.2 based). Sapphire was the first to be released but now the other developers are starting to trickle in with their own versions. The process to flash the phone is quite a bit more difficult and time consuming than other phones such as the eris or the nexus, but it is finally possible to bypass that pesky eFuse that Motorola insisted on using to taunt developers with. Below is a video of one of those roms running froyo on the DroidX



For those of you who own a Droid X and want to try out the new roms you can go to the xda-developer forums for the Droid X and read up on it. Be careful though, the process isnt a walk in the park, it does take some work.