Verizon Wireless introduced the company's second "Droid" Android phone on Thursday, and it's what a lot of people expected: a rebadged version of the HTC Hero for Sprint, called the Droid Eris.

The Eris goes on sale on Friday for $99 with a two-year contract and various rebates, making it $100 less expensive than the larger, more powerful Motorola Droid. Just like the Sprint Hero, it has a 3.2-inch, 320x480 capacitive multitouch screen and a 528-MHz Qualcomm processor. It runs Google Android 1.5 with HTC's proprietary "Sense" extensions.

The Droid Eris is a little bit thinner than the Hero; it's black to the Hero's silver, and the phone also contains a proximity sensor to turn the screen off when it's held up to your face. I like the slim, black soft-touch body; it feels petite and very usable.

HTC's Sense UI adds some features to Android 1.5 that aren't even available in Android 2.0, such as pinch-to-zoom in the photo viewer. HTC's "People" app replaces the standard contacts app, letting you merge folks' Facebook and Flickr accounts into their contact cards and easily flip between the calls you've made and the messages you've sent to a particular person. There's a built-in Twitter app, too. Sense is, all around, a somewhat lusher UI than the stock Android UI on the Droid.

I was very surprised to see no Verizon software on the phone, other than Visual Voicemail. Sprint's Hero is loaded up with Sprint apps, but Verizon has been taking a hands-off approach, both with the Droid and the Eris.

The big question, of course, is whether the Eris feels slow. It's definitely much slower than the Droid in terms of benchmarks, and I expect it might start dragging once you have a bunch of apps open. But I didn't immediately see the bugs I saw on the Hero - which, after all, is a few months old now - which gave me hope that the Eris will be a more solid device.

For a full review of the Hero, which has a very similar feature set to the Eris, see our review.