The Essential Phone has just broken cover. It's the
first phone by the namesake company, conceived by Andy Rubin, the person who
created Android and showing his idea of what the Android phone of the future
should look like. And it's a daring new device: it's a true bezel-less phone
with a full-screen display that takes even more of the front than the Galaxy
S8, and it's a modular phone at its core.
A NEW RIVAL TO IPHONES AND SAMSUNG GALAXIES
EMERGESPlus, it's an all-out flagship phone that is launching first in the
United States. It's got all flagship bells and whistles: the top-end Qualcomm
Snapdragon 835 system chip with 4 gigs of RAM, and a whopping 128GB of on-board
storage. But it's also different than
many flagships in its philosophy: it ships with no junk bloatware, and it does
not even have a logo, a welcome change from popular flagships where you often
have overwhelming stamps and logos all over the place.
The phone is also made to last. Since it's a
bezel-less design, it's especially important that the Essential Phone is
durable. To ensure this, the company uses titanium for the body of the device,
a material so hard that when you drop the phone on its edge, it does not dent
or scratch like aluminum. The back is made of ceramic, a material that is very
hard to scratch. In terms of colors, the Essential Phone will be available in
black, grey, white and a dual-tone model. Of course, it has gone through drop
tests to ensure that it will withstand the damage of an average drop as much as
possible.
But the real magic, the special sauce of the
Essential Phone is that it is trying to create something new: a system of
accessories and modules. For this, the phone has a magnetic connector in the
form of two dots located on the back of the phone, where you can snap
additional modules. The handset also comes with a dedicated wireless data
transfer connector that supports speeds of up to 6Gbps. The first accessory
coming with it is a 360-degree camera that you can magnetically snap to the
back of the phone. It comes as a bundle with the phone for just US$ 50 on top of
the Essential Phone's price.
On the back, the Essential has got a dual-camera
system. It's not like the one on the iPhone, though. Here, the secondary camera
is monochrome one, that captures much more light, and the output from the
regular camera combined with the monochrome picture is combined for a superior
end result. Up front, there is an 8-megapixel camera for selfies that shoots 4K
videos.
It should also be noted: the Essential Phone does
not have a 3.5mm headset jack, just like the iPhone 7. You can reserve your
Essential Phone starting today, May 30th, but this does not mean that you will
get it soon and a reservation is not a pre-order. In fact, Essential is clearly
saying that it is not yet ready to provide a specific release date for the
phone. We know the price: it's US$ 700 for the phone, slightly above the price of
a modern flagship like the iPhone, but on par with the Samsung Galaxy S8, and US$ 750 for a bundle with the magnetically connecting 360-degree camera.
We also know that the Essential Phone has the proper
4G LTE support and CDMA support to run on all four major U.S. carriers
including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, but we do not yet know when
it will be available. It's also not clear when or whether the phone will be
available outside the United States, but chances are that this will happen at a
further time in the future.
Sure, the Essential Phone will have a hard time
competing against the iPhones and Galaxies in the world, but it provides
something else: a breath of fresh air for those who want something new and
something different in a flagship. We for once, can't wait to try it.
