Essential phone

This is the Essential Phone

Another Member of the Bezel Less Game

The Essential Phone, is brought to us by the person who created ANDROID, is finally out for the spotlight. It's an incredibly ambitious project, with an outstanding bezel less display and it is beginning of new modular era of smartphones.

First The Basics, This phone costs $699 with top of line specs and feature like edge to edge display which wraps around the front facing camera is amazing and crosses even samsung reaches the top of the hill.

Essential is initially launching this phone in US, with it's amazing flagship android internals like qualcomm snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM and 128GB of Internal Storage without expandability. Surprisingly the phone doesn't even ship with the company logo, chances seem good there won't be a ton extraneous junk software loaded on to slow the phone down.

Essential is clearly planning on releasing a very well-made phone: the screen looks promising, it has no annoying logos, and it is built with a combination of titanium and ceramic so it can survive a drop test “without blemish, unlike the aluminum competitor devices.” (Those would be Samsung and Apple, if you’re wondering.)

But nice hardware isn’t all that hard to come by on Android phones, so the company is aiming to build an ecosystem of accessories. It starts with a magnetic connector and wireless data transfer. Essential will ship a 360-degree camera that can click in to the top of the phone, and the company will also offer a charging dock. Both connect to the phone with small metal pogo pins. They won’t entirely replace USB-C for most people, but Essential is clearly hoping that they could someday.

Photo: Essential

Speaking of ports, there is no traditional 3.5mm headphone jack — which is a bummer. We’re told that it will ship with a headphone dongle in the box. It’s possible that other audio accessories could be made that could clip on to the magnetic accessory port.

The Essential Phone also has a good take on the dual-camera systems we’ve seen on other phones. Rather than use the second lens for telephoto or bokeh, it’s using it for a monochrome sensor, just like Huawei has been doing with the P9 and P10. That second sensor will be able to take in more light than a traditional color camera, meaning it can be combined with the regular 13-megapixel for better low-light shots. The front-facing camera is in line with current expectations, too: an 8-megapixel sensor that can also capture 4K video.

Photo: Essential

All that sounds great, but it ignores some key facts in the smartphone space: Apple and Samsung have it pretty locked up right now. The pessimist might say that although this phone looks incredible, it is also likely to break upon the shoals of the phone market, the same rocks that have cracked every Android phone that doesn’t have the Samsung logo emblazoned on it: carrier support, consumer interest, and lack of true differentiation.

But when it comes to cracking on the rocks, Andy Rubin claims that the Essential phone’s titanium and ceramic build is better able to withstand a drop test. Presumably, Essential’s grander ambitions are equally durable — it’s impossible to look at just this phone outside the context of Essential’s other announcements: the Essential Home speaker and its Ambient OS.

Even if those ambitions don’t bear out, the Essential Phone itself is exciting on its own. It’s a simple, straightforward Android device that respects the user: it’s powerful, clean, and not entirely beholden to the business whims of the giant companies that currently control the mobile and smart home markets.

If nothing else, it deserves our attention because it’s coming from Andy Rubin, who knows a thing or two about doing the right thing in the smartphone world.