The Essential Phone is official:

Michael Fisher said the camera is garbage. Watch his review if you want to see examples.
 
The Galaxy S8 line is actually rated IP68, not just IP67. Bit I hate Scamsuck phones anyways, mainly because of Lagwiz.

IMO best smartphone of 2017 will be the Pixel XL 2
 
The Galaxy S8 line is actually rated IP68, not just IP67. Bit I hate Scamsuck phones anyways, mainly because of Lagwiz.

IMO best smartphone of 2017 will be the Pixel XL 2

Pixel XL 2 or Iphone 8/Pro has potential. Galaxy S8 and Note will probably win a few phone of the year awards from reviewers who don't use them long enough to get tired of touchwiz's bullshit.
 
Michael Fisher said the camera is garbage. Watch his review if you want to see examples.

It sounds like they might fix some of the issues with software updates, but that just points to another problem: a rushed release. I suspect Rubin and crew were so determined to get ahead of the fall release cycle (where they'd undoubtedly be drowned out by Apple/Samsung/Google) that they shipped weeks or even months before they should have. In a sense, they were in a horrible position: they likely did need to get the Essential phone out ahead of others to get some attention, but doing so meant a device that wouldn't be as well-received.

The upshot is that the phone doesn't need to ship in large numbers for Essential to have enough breathing room to make a second device. The question is whether or not it has the software skills to produce truly great pictures, or if the Essential line will always trail behind.
 
[Update] " Of course a camera update lands as soon as the review goes up. Anyway, just updated to NMI54B and TLDR: not much different on the camera front. App still slow, low-light still way sub-optimal. Twitter ain't the best medium for picture sharing but it's what I've got for now" - MrMobile [Michael Fisher]


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I will just say this final thing. Once the Pixel 2 is announced in a month so come October, and at a similar price point as last years, which is still rumored to be true, in the $650 for the small Pixel and $750 for the XL 2, who the hell would buy the $700 Essential over these new Pixel's ? I sure the hell wouldn't.

Or the iPhone 8, especially if there's a stable Jailbreak released for it a few months later. I'd take an JB'd iPhone 8 from a carrier all day long over this Essential. To me a Jailbreaked iPhone is a really cool phone then.

And the upcoming LG V30 looks to be a real winner too, and LG always offers big discounts after a couple months on their new phone, I bet the V30 will be selling for $600 off contract by Christmas. I'd take a $600 LG V30 over a $700 Essential.

And then there's rumors of a OnePlus 5T coming in December / January, with the SD836 and bigger battery, all for $500 or less, I'd take the 5T for $499 over a $700 Essential.

I think once these new phones come out this Fall / Winter, the Essential phone will have a real hard time selling, unless they discount it big time to be more in the OnePlus pricing.

Lastly;


If the Essential had better spec's like other 2017 flagships, I'd be totally cool with the $700, and would have bought one myself, but it's missing;

- IP68 water resistance, like the Galaxy S8,/ Note 8, iPhone 8, Pixel 2, and LG V30
- Wireless charging all the other flagships coming this Fall
- OLED display, again all these new flagships have the better OLED screens
- Bigger battery, I think this phone should have like 3,500mAh battery to be a battery beast, but 3,050mAh is just ok, not bad, not great.
 
Yeah, I wonder who's stupid enough to upload your driver's license to any company to begin with. I'd rather not buy it if they asked me to do that. But is that like hating on the victims?
 
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At least they handled the aftermath well. Lots of companies would just deny it to the bitter end and blame "a disgruntled former employee" if they ever truly got outed.
 
For the price of the phone, it damned well better have a near complete warranty plan behind it considering that iFixit score - and those guys at iFixit pretty much wrote the book (as it exists, wherever) on making repair work on smartphones and other mobile devices as easy as possible. With the tools they've got access to and the stuff they make up as they go along to get the jobs done easier, if they say it's a 1 out of 10 meaning about the worst it can possibly be then geez man, why would anyone buy this thing in the first place? :confused:
 
Reading some other forum, people saying don't care about iFixit bad rating. They say with it's super tough titanium and ceramic build, it should be near indestructible.

Yeah, ok
 
Reading some other forum, people saying don't care about iFixit bad rating. They say with it's super tough titanium and ceramic build, it should be near indestructible.

Yeah, ok

Heh, that seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how those materials work.

It will be resilient in certain ways, but don't drop it face-first on asphalt and expect it to come out unscathed. And ceramic is scratch-resistant, but not drop-resistant -- it's brittle, so it'll shatter with a forceful enough impact.
 
I can't tell if this is a good review or a bad one...
Putting aside opinions regarding the often debated practicality of Jerry's testing, the Essential did good in the scratch test and very good (actually exemplary) in the bend test.

Outside of the test results the only complimentary comment I heard him say was:
"Inside the box you get a nicely braided cable".

Which was trounced by, "Supposedly this device is Android boiled down to the bare essentials, also while calling it future proof. Personally, I always thought devices from the future would have more features instead of less. But then it might just be me".
 
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So many things about this phone that run counter to the audience it seems primed for.

Why is it that every "nerd phone" like OnePlus and Essential makes design choices as if it's being marketed as a fashion statement for 16 year old girls? Form over function, shiny over durable, "premium unibody!!" over repairable, no expandable storage...

The world of Android OEMs collectively lost their minds about 5 years ago, and have since been breathlessly trying to out-Apple one another in a game they can never win.
 


If you had preconceptions what would happen to Essential's ceramic back during a drop test, it was dropped seven times during this test.
 
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Not to beat a dead horse, but Essential explains why no headphone jack on the Essential phone on Reddit AMA.

Headphone jacks are pretty big components and they don't play nice with all-screen Phone architectures. We studied it very seriously, but fitting a headphone jack into our Phone required tradeoffs we were uncomfortable with. We'd have grow a huge "chin" in the display and reduce the battery capacity by 10%, or we'd need a huge headphone bump! We decided it was more important to have a beautiful full-screen display in a thin device with solid battery life.​

Essential will have a headphone jack in a audio clip on. I assume it'll have some DAC + amp.

T4rd will likely say that this is proof that MONEY GRAB is the ONLY reason why Apple, I mean... Essential removed the headphone jack... Haha
 
That line of reasoning is BS - look at the LG V30, big ass "all-screen" display, still got a headphone jack so yes it can be done. I suppose this is me ranting again, but that's how it goes - manufacturers are just coming up with vapor-decisions I'd say and won't just be honest enough to say "We don't want to put a headphone jack in our devices because <reason here even if people won't like it>."

Or maybe they just don't have enough talented engineers to make it a possibility, who knows, but I simply don't buy any of the reasons that some manufacturers are offering up like that one from Essential (countered by the V30), the Apple one about water-resistance (countered by the 4+ year old Galaxy S4 Active and all the other Actives so far including the Galaxy S8 Active which is on the way), and various others along the way.

It can be done, without major hassles, and still keep the device relatively thin and structurally quite tough, it's just a question of wanting to do it and some companies apparently aren't wiling to do it anymore so that's how it goes.

If you surveyed 1,000 people who use headphones/IEMs about a headphone jack I can pretty much guarantee you that 950+ of them would say "Yes, I require a headphone jack for my smartphone."
 
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In watching those (and other) drop videos I can't help but wish more phones had textured backs/sides with a tiny lip to protect the screen. It's not like that would make any device significantly larger.
Especially when the goal for a phone is not to need a case.
 
That line of reasoning is BS - look at the LG V30, big ass "all-screen" display, still got a headphone jack so yes it can be done. I suppose this is me ranting again, but that's how it goes - manufacturers are just coming up with vapor-decisions I'd say and won't just be honest enough to say "We don't want to put a headphone jack in our devices because <reason here even if people won't like it>."

Agreed. While I don't care that the century old analog tech is going away I do wish companies would be straight up. Rubin's line of reasoning looks good at first glance but it is horseshit when you really start to look at it.

Essential PH-1 - 7.8mm thick
LG G6 - 7.9mm thick
LG V30 - 7.4mm thick

The V30 is a larger phone that is thinner and still retains the 3.5mm jack. :eek:
 
Easily broken thin piece of glass vs tough to break thicker ceramics.

Thin OLED display vs traditional thicker LCD display with a notch.

Y'all act as if there's not plenty good reasons why the Essential would be thicker than V30...
 
Easily broken thin piece of glass vs tough to break thicker ceramics.

Thin OLED display vs traditional thicker LCD display with a notch.

Y'all act as if there's not plenty good reasons why the Essential would be thicker than V30...

I think you missed the point. We're not arguing about Essential not being thinner. We're discussing what Rubin said in regards to the 3.5mm taking up too much space and how that's a bullshit claim. For reference the V20 with a traditional LCD and all aluminum body is 7.6mm thick and had a 3.5mm jack.

Bottom line is Rubin spewed a bullshit answer about not including 3.5 on PH-1. If they didn't want PH-1 to have a 3.5mm jack that's fine. Just don't bullshit everybody about it by claiming it wouldn't fit.
 
The point is different material with different thickness of display panel and case backing means that the phone that may be thicker may not have space for the headphones. The V20 also have a larger bezel.
 

That's just through Sprint, though (since it's the only retail option). I'd bet that it actually has better sales online. Still not hot, but at least Essential was clear in that it didn't expect to come anywhere close to major vendors in terms of shipping numbers. This is a startup that just happened to get major carrier deals for its boutique, first-generation hardware.
 
I've seen a decent number of prime time TV commercials for it. The problem is that they're too focused on the 360 camera add-in. They literally don't get into anything else about it. I'm not convinced enough people actually give a damn about that feature.
 
so according to the forums, the stupid notch on the iPhone X is un acceptable, but on an android phone its good?

they both look like crap with the notches, just put a sli, bezel on there and be done with it
 
What do you think of this?

Left vs Right

Which one would you pick?

camera-cutouts.jpg


neither, but if forced id pick the one with the stable OS and superior app store. notches are stupid regardless of android/apple
 
neither, but if forced id pick the one with the stable OS and superior app store. notches are stupid regardless of android/apple

As "unpopular" as I'm sure this opinion is, honestly neither of them bother me. The only issues to me are software implementation. I mostly agree with others that forcing app devs to make the notch visible in landscape seems silly. Especially with an OLED screen. There is no reason to not allow Apple devs to black it out, if for no other reason than to simply not be distracting.

The good news is, if enough people complain, Apple themselves will probably reverse on it. I think that Essential did the clean UI right. However, I wouldn't go as far to say that that one UI issue is device breaking. I'd still get a X if I just had a bunch of money to burn. It would just be "annoying". It's minimized by the fact that I don't really do a lot in landscape anyway, other than watching video content.
 
Sales a super bad on this phone. Some reports saying only 5,000 were sold to date as of September. So's what will happen with this phone in the near future ? If sales continue to be lackluster and very low, what's their next course of action ?

I know they are just now getting around to releasing the kernel source in image files, which is needed for the development community to root and ROM this phone. Look at XDA and there's no activity for this phone, and this phone should be super popular on XDA for the nerd modders, but it's not. That's a bad sign for Essential.

If I was Andy Rubin, I'd just throw towel in sort of, and lower the price of this phone, and push it more as a Nexus type of a phone, meaning affordable price with near flagship spec's, but also a developer phone. That way you can slowly build up a fan base on this phone. But keeping it at $700, and with the known issues or lower quality stuff, people will just avoid this phone. They need to lower the price to like $549.
 
I wouldn't be too worried about sales, as Essential and Andy himself said that they do not expect to sell very many units. Whether or not that's still below they estimations, I don't know. Quit frankly, we don't know what their game is. Is it just simply to build a brand out there?
 
This phone would be perfect if it filled the old Nexus phone role meaning an affordable Flagship geared towards developers and the Nerds. Put this in the $500 price range and this phone will fly off the shelf, but of course have an unlocked bootloader and make it easy to root and push it on developers and the phone will slowly start to build a following, and then build upon it year after year and eventually maybe in 3 or 4 years it could become a big hit.

But do not bring out a new phone, charge $700 for it, and not have it truly 2017 flagship spec'd, as in missing IP67/68 water resistant certification, no wireless charging, no OLED display, an average to poor camera, a somewhat small battery, would love it if it had like a 3,500mAh battery. And then for being a stock Android type OS, it should have ZERO hiccups or stutters, stock is supposed to be buttery smooth, like the Pixel and even OnePlus 5 phones, you can't launch a brand new stock Android type phone, and have it stutter here and there, that's a good way to turn people away.

This phone almost seems as if it was rushed out before it was complete.

The thing is, this phone is a real beauty, stunning looking phone, and the size very compact and can be one handed, but it's overpriced for what your getting, and they need to iron out the bugs A.S.A.P. And they need a price drop, but how do they reduce the price of the phone, without pissing off the people that already paid full retail for it ? But they need to drop the price to get sales moving, unless they just don't care, and will wait for the Essential 2 next year ??
 
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To me it feels like a phone that was mostly designed to compete against the flagships from 2016. I still think they're overdoing the 360 camera thing, too. That's literally all the commercials focus on. Who cares?
 
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