While Verizon might not be shoving the HTC Droid Eris down our throats the same way they are with its Motorola-made sibling, the Droid, the Eris is still one slick little piece of mobile kit. What it lacks in form factor (that is, a physical keyboard), it makes up with its drop-dead-gorgeous Sense UI. The only shortcoming, as I see it, is that it’s still stuck on Android v1.5 while the Droid is touting around 2.0.

That issue will be fixed before too long, says Verizon. We already know that HTC is cracking away at getting Sense to play friend with version of Android 2.1, and now Verizon has set a loose date for the Eris’ update: Q1 2010. While they didn’t specifically say it’d be 2.0, they did say that it would include the turn-by-turn Google Maps Navigation function – which, unfortunately, only absolutely proves that it’ll be at least v1.6. Fortunately, InformationWeek dug for a bit more info, and Verizon confirmed that the Q1 upgrade would likely bump the Eris up to v2.0 or v2.1.