The Essential Phone: A Flagship Smartphone with a Unique Approach

One of the most interesting things about the Essential Phone is its 360-degree camera mod, which allows users to attach a small camera to the back of their phone, creating a periscope-like effect. This implementation is a testament to the company's focus on innovation and flexibility. The camera itself is a dual-camera sensor with 13 megapixels each, but unfortunately, it lacks optical image stabilization. However, the results are still quite solid, and users can access features like HDR and portrait mode.

One of the most notable aspects of the Essential Phone is its camera functionality. While it may not have all the bells and whistles, it's a capable camera that delivers good results. The dual-camera setup allows for interesting creative possibilities, such as shooting in color or monochrome. However, there are some drawbacks to the camera experience. For example, there's no exposure slider, which can make it difficult to adjust the brightness and contrast of the photos.

The Essential Phone also has a unique approach to battery life. Rather than relying on traditional power-hungry features like wireless charging or high-resolution displays, the phone uses a smaller, more efficient design. This allows for decent battery life, even with heavy use. In fact, in our testing, we found that the phone managed to last well into the day, albeit with some throttling.

While the Essential Phone is certainly a compelling device, it's not without its flaws. One of the biggest drawbacks is the lack of waterproofing, which may be a deal-breaker for some users. Additionally, there's no headphone jack or microSD card slot, which can limit the user experience. However, these omissions are largely mitigated by the phone's strong performance and solid battery life.

In terms of software, the Essential Phone runs Android 7.1.1 out of the box, with promises that it will soon receive Android Oreo updates. This is a significant advantage for users who value regular security patches and feature updates.

In terms of availability, the Essential Phone is currently only available from Sprint, but it can be purchased unlocked and works on any carrier.

Overall, the Essential Phone offers a unique approach to smartphone design that sets it apart from more traditional flagships. While it may have some drawbacks, its strong performance, solid battery life, and innovative camera features make it an attractive option for users looking for something different.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone its Julian from Digital Trends and I'm here with the essential fund it's the first phone by the creator of Android and Rubin as companies called essential and this is technically called the pH one which when you spell off the one it says phone so that's the essential phone now immediately off the bat you can see the design is very unique it's got this little notch over here at the top where the camera sits and the bezel is extended all the way to the top and it's a little slight chain or here at the bottom but it's very similar to the bezel this trend of other smartphones such as LG g6 and the samsung galaxy s 8 and now the note 2 8 that we saw this week let's take a look at the back and you'll see there's actually no branding of the essential logo anywhere on this phone it's because they wanted to keep it as minimal and as much of a phone for you rather than anyone else or for the company to promote so again this is a very minimal looking phone as you can see here we got the fingerprint sensor dual camera setup right there and over here I'll leave these two little pins that I'll talk about in a little bit but let's take some quick specs rundown it got the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 which is the same processor you'll find on other phones like the galaxy s 8 a 13 megapixel dual cameras four gigs of RAM you get 128 gigs of internal storage that's the only option because there's also no micro SD card slot and a 30 40 million powered battery which is fairly standard among smartphones these days but this this talk about this screen for a second its quad HD display but the screen is actually 5.7 inches now it's only a hair taller and wider than the regular iPhone 7 and that's green is 4.7 inches so you're getting a whole extra inch of display with just a marginally bigger phone from the regular iPhone 7 and that means again huge display pretty compact phone if you have large hands to be fair but it's it's very comfortably and feels like a normal-sized phone to me one of the more interesting things is the choice of materials it's actually titanium body so over here on the sides you can see it's a titanium that should mean it should survive those drops pretty well and on the back is a beautiful ceramic feels nice to the touch and feel soft almost kind of like glass but it actually lets the antenna signals through much better which is why they don't have those ugly antenna bands on the back so let's talk about the software it's almost the same exact experience you'll find in the Google pixel it's pure Android no bloatware or no fluff or extra apps it's all the same exact apps you'll find on the Google pixel or pure Android it is running Android 7.1.1 as you can see here but it will be getting Oreo soon as you can see here this is a little notch when we first saw this design with the notch here in the camera here we thought it might interfere with the software but it's it's actually designed around it so that never blocked anything important and later on if I get a notification you might see that the camera actually the notifications extend out a little longer than usual and that's how they get around the fact of potentially having things block blocked by that camera cut out there as you can see though you have a straight access to the Google feed normal app launcher like on the pixel pretty standard settings and of course Google assistant got the power button here on the bottom the volume rocker next to it and over here USB type-c charging port SIM card tray is actually over here which is interesting and sadly at just one bottom firing speaker but before we go any further I do want to take a second to talk about these pins that I mentioned earlier so this is actually kind of similar to the motorola moto z moto Z mod where basically Motorola has 16 pogo pins over here and you slap on moto mods that enhance your phone for example a 360-degree camera mod or battery mod that extends the battery battery of your phone this implementation is allows the mod to be much smaller and you can just slap it right here and all it does is the phone charges the mod and the data is transferred wirelessly so one of the first mods that's available is actually 360-degree camera as well and you basically slap it on and it's like a little periscope like thing basically unless you take syringe to bigger photos and it does all the processing so your smartphone doesn't have to do much except power it and that the photos and everything is transferred wirelessly to the phone so it's an interesting implementation because it means the company does not have to change or they don't it's not an issue if they change the design next year the build of the phone because they only have to make sure that these two pogo pins lie in a specific alignment and space that doesn't interfere with the phone's design there's not a lot of special features on this phone it's very bare-bones pure Android not a lot of gimmicky features some of the only things that you would really see are the camera let's watch it right here again as I mentioned it's a dual-camera sensor 13 megapixels each sadly no oh is optical image stabilization but it's a pretty good camera the results are pretty solid the only problem that we've been having is that there's a lot of lag and shutter lag that makes sometimes the photos super blurry if you're not keeping your hand super still but let's go through some of the functions here so take a photo and there's some photos that I just took on the regular camera now there is this HDR function over here so you can turn that on and of course there's so the interesting thing is that the dual camera one shoots you know color and the other shoots in mono and you can actually just go straight to mono it's very similar to the Huawei like your camera it's sadly there's no exposure slider which is kind of a strange thing to leave out so you can't control that exposure slider right before you take the shot so things might look either too dull or too bright feels very bare-bones to the camera because they seem to be missing some features for example HDR was a recent addition and portrait mode is something that's going to be coming soon not sure when but they did mention it's coming so camera still feels like a work in progress battery life has been decent I think today I've been using at the phone a lot and surprisingly it's at 28% right now it was a lot worse the other two days but that's because I had an app that was drying the battery a lot I uninstalled it and now it's been significantly better I actually probably used this phone way too much it did a lot of benchmark benchmark tests and took a lot of photos today and video so today might be a heavy use case type of situation and 28% it's not bad for a smartphone these days although it could be better not the best but definitely for a medium usage or even sometimes high usage you can definitely expect at least a full day's worth of battery but definitely nothing more so all in all the essential phone has flagship specs work-in-progress camera but everything else seems to be pretty on par with a lot of smartphones these days flagship smartphones some of the only things that we don't like about it that's missing in this price range is that has no waterproofing most phones in its price range do there's no headphone jack of course which is always a sad thing to see and there's no microSD card slot which isn't terrible but there are phones out there like the note 8 the Galaxy s8 on the LG g6 they all come with microSD card slots so you can only buy one storage option here so it's kind of a bummer but at the same time you are getting 128 gigs so that really depends if you need that much storage or if you don't then you might want to look at some smaller or smaller storage phones this phone offers a decent bang for your buck I think it offers strong performance a solid battery life great software experience and best of all you should be getting software and security updates pretty regularly that's pretty important and have those downsides that I mentioned no waterproofing that totally up to you if you like that stuff or not or if you think your phone should have it especially at this price if you should know Sprint is the only carrier that's selling it but you can buy the phone from a central comm and it's unlocked and works on every carrier so the app for recap that's the essential phone also known as the essential pH one it's the first phone by Andy Rubin and it's a phone that's currently running Android 7.1.1 and will soon get Android Oreohi everyone its Julian from Digital Trends and I'm here with the essential fund it's the first phone by the creator of Android and Rubin as companies called essential and this is technically called the pH one which when you spell off the one it says phone so that's the essential phone now immediately off the bat you can see the design is very unique it's got this little notch over here at the top where the camera sits and the bezel is extended all the way to the top and it's a little slight chain or here at the bottom but it's very similar to the bezel this trend of other smartphones such as LG g6 and the samsung galaxy s 8 and now the note 2 8 that we saw this week let's take a look at the back and you'll see there's actually no branding of the essential logo anywhere on this phone it's because they wanted to keep it as minimal and as much of a phone for you rather than anyone else or for the company to promote so again this is a very minimal looking phone as you can see here we got the fingerprint sensor dual camera setup right there and over here I'll leave these two little pins that I'll talk about in a little bit but let's take some quick specs rundown it got the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 which is the same processor you'll find on other phones like the galaxy s 8 a 13 megapixel dual cameras four gigs of RAM you get 128 gigs of internal storage that's the only option because there's also no micro SD card slot and a 30 40 million powered battery which is fairly standard among smartphones these days but this this talk about this screen for a second its quad HD display but the screen is actually 5.7 inches now it's only a hair taller and wider than the regular iPhone 7 and that's green is 4.7 inches so you're getting a whole extra inch of display with just a marginally bigger phone from the regular iPhone 7 and that means again huge display pretty compact phone if you have large hands to be fair but it's it's very comfortably and feels like a normal-sized phone to me one of the more interesting things is the choice of materials it's actually titanium body so over here on the sides you can see it's a titanium that should mean it should survive those drops pretty well and on the back is a beautiful ceramic feels nice to the touch and feel soft almost kind of like glass but it actually lets the antenna signals through much better which is why they don't have those ugly antenna bands on the back so let's talk about the software it's almost the same exact experience you'll find in the Google pixel it's pure Android no bloatware or no fluff or extra apps it's all the same exact apps you'll find on the Google pixel or pure Android it is running Android 7.1.1 as you can see here but it will be getting Oreo soon as you can see here this is a little notch when we first saw this design with the notch here in the camera here we thought it might interfere with the software but it's it's actually designed around it so that never blocked anything important and later on if I get a notification you might see that the camera actually the notifications extend out a little longer than usual and that's how they get around the fact of potentially having things block blocked by that camera cut out there as you can see though you have a straight access to the Google feed normal app launcher like on the pixel pretty standard settings and of course Google assistant got the power button here on the bottom the volume rocker next to it and over here USB type-c charging port SIM card tray is actually over here which is interesting and sadly at just one bottom firing speaker but before we go any further I do want to take a second to talk about these pins that I mentioned earlier so this is actually kind of similar to the motorola moto z moto Z mod where basically Motorola has 16 pogo pins over here and you slap on moto mods that enhance your phone for example a 360-degree camera mod or battery mod that extends the battery battery of your phone this implementation is allows the mod to be much smaller and you can just slap it right here and all it does is the phone charges the mod and the data is transferred wirelessly so one of the first mods that's available is actually 360-degree camera as well and you basically slap it on and it's like a little periscope like thing basically unless you take syringe to bigger photos and it does all the processing so your smartphone doesn't have to do much except power it and that the photos and everything is transferred wirelessly to the phone so it's an interesting implementation because it means the company does not have to change or they don't it's not an issue if they change the design next year the build of the phone because they only have to make sure that these two pogo pins lie in a specific alignment and space that doesn't interfere with the phone's design there's not a lot of special features on this phone it's very bare-bones pure Android not a lot of gimmicky features some of the only things that you would really see are the camera let's watch it right here again as I mentioned it's a dual-camera sensor 13 megapixels each sadly no oh is optical image stabilization but it's a pretty good camera the results are pretty solid the only problem that we've been having is that there's a lot of lag and shutter lag that makes sometimes the photos super blurry if you're not keeping your hand super still but let's go through some of the functions here so take a photo and there's some photos that I just took on the regular camera now there is this HDR function over here so you can turn that on and of course there's so the interesting thing is that the dual camera one shoots you know color and the other shoots in mono and you can actually just go straight to mono it's very similar to the Huawei like your camera it's sadly there's no exposure slider which is kind of a strange thing to leave out so you can't control that exposure slider right before you take the shot so things might look either too dull or too bright feels very bare-bones to the camera because they seem to be missing some features for example HDR was a recent addition and portrait mode is something that's going to be coming soon not sure when but they did mention it's coming so camera still feels like a work in progress battery life has been decent I think today I've been using at the phone a lot and surprisingly it's at 28% right now it was a lot worse the other two days but that's because I had an app that was drying the battery a lot I uninstalled it and now it's been significantly better I actually probably used this phone way too much it did a lot of benchmark benchmark tests and took a lot of photos today and video so today might be a heavy use case type of situation and 28% it's not bad for a smartphone these days although it could be better not the best but definitely for a medium usage or even sometimes high usage you can definitely expect at least a full day's worth of battery but definitely nothing more so all in all the essential phone has flagship specs work-in-progress camera but everything else seems to be pretty on par with a lot of smartphones these days flagship smartphones some of the only things that we don't like about it that's missing in this price range is that has no waterproofing most phones in its price range do there's no headphone jack of course which is always a sad thing to see and there's no microSD card slot which isn't terrible but there are phones out there like the note 8 the Galaxy s8 on the LG g6 they all come with microSD card slots so you can only buy one storage option here so it's kind of a bummer but at the same time you are getting 128 gigs so that really depends if you need that much storage or if you don't then you might want to look at some smaller or smaller storage phones this phone offers a decent bang for your buck I think it offers strong performance a solid battery life great software experience and best of all you should be getting software and security updates pretty regularly that's pretty important and have those downsides that I mentioned no waterproofing that totally up to you if you like that stuff or not or if you think your phone should have it especially at this price if you should know Sprint is the only carrier that's selling it but you can buy the phone from a central comm and it's unlocked and works on every carrier so the app for recap that's the essential phone also known as the essential pH one it's the first phone by Andy Rubin and it's a phone that's currently running Android 7.1.1 and will soon get Android Oreo\n"