Essential Phone
Essential Products, headquartered in Palo Alto, California was founded by Andy Rubin. Andy, the current CEO of Essential Products is an American programmer, engineer and an entrepreneur who was also one of the co-founders of Android. He left Google in 2014 to start an incubator for hardware startups.
The firm’s first product, Essential PH-1 aka Essential Phone was launched in May, 2017.
What's under the hood?
The Essential Phone packs all the flagship hardware and is powered by 1.9GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. It comes with 4 gigs of RAM and a 128GB non-expandable storage and runs on a 3040 mAh non-removable storage.
PS It runs on android.
Will it be your primary camera?
TThe rear cam is a 12 mega-pixels, while the one of front is 8 mega-pixel and both support 4K shooting. It offers f1.85 aperture with laser autofocus. and two-tone flash. The shocker is that a minimum of 12 mp camera lens is required for 4K recording, I wonder how’s Essential gonna render it!
What I feel about the phone:
The display is around 6 inches long making it more of a phablet with zero-bezels. I feel getting rid of bezels is a great idea but not at the cost of hampering phone’s aesthetics! Here the camera’s in a groove over the display interfering with android’s status bar. This is no way leading us to sophisticated design but one like instagram’s current logo, made in a hurry to meet the deadline, sort of. Apart from the camera lens hanging in middle of the screen, the phone’s over all design is satisfactory with a bezel-chin at the bottom. It’s quite a cuboidal machine giving it a blocky look like the iPhone SE’s. Surprisingly ceramic back in addition to the edges made of the titanium makes it quite durable and stronger than the rest.
Like the iPhone and Le TV, even Essential get’s rid of 3.5mm audio jack. Both the micro usb and audio jack have been replaced by a single USB C.
And the touch id at the back is quite disappointing as for the times when the phone's simply kept on the table-surface or similar scenarios. Although it mustn't take time getting used to physically pick up the phone everytime you need to unlock it.
On the back, the phone provides 2 pin-point ports. These pogo pins are designed to transfer power to the devices connected wirelessly via a magnetic connection to the phone. Thus the phone comes with an alternative offer with additional 50$ charge offering-
- Dock
- 360• Camera
All in all, the phone look’s okay-ish and nothing extra-ordinary for $700. By direct conversion it accounts to INR 45,000 but will be slightly more than that for the Indian market. However the phone’s been launched only in the US and as of now Essential has no plan for expansion in India in near future.