The Essential Phone is a beautiful example of everything that’s wrong with Android - petersonnotat1992

Stop me if you've heard this one. An Android phone manufacturer comes along with a hot modern premium French telephone that promises to deliver everything we've always wanted: speed, handsomeness, and performance. This time around it's Andy Rubin's Requisite Phone, the latest handset vying for hundreds of your hard-earned dollars with the prognosticate of offering the most complete Mechanical man experience around.

But for complete of its colourful features and pretty curves, the Essential Phone will likely face the same uphill battles encountered by other unlocked phones: namely an OS that doesn't hitch fresh, a gimmicky ecosystem that falls short of its promise, and limited attack aircraft carrier support.

It besides lacks a headphone jack.

Rubin's new phone may comprise a gorgeous, precocious piece of tech, but it still risks dropping into the same pitfalls that took down many a hyped Humanoid phone. And piece Rubin might be selling Essential as something different, it has a tough row to hoe if it hopes to annul them.

Feature article frenzy

The Essential Phone is presented as a image from the future, but the truth is we've seen these gimmicks before, with varying results. The magnetised modular connecter was a bust for the LG G5 but slightly more successful on the Moto Z. The thin, asymmetrical bezel makes it look something like the Military Intelligence Section 6 Mix (though I can't stop wondering wherefore it needed to force that weird camera cutout). Even the dual photographic camera system, which Essential claims is the world's thinnest, is clean dull these days.

essential camera — Essential Phone places a premium on its shooting capabilities.

But what's most newsworthy is the companion dwelling house verbaliser. The renders we've seen look marvelous, and Essential says the Speaker mechanically connects to new and existing devices. It will too backup Siri, Google Adjunct, and Alexa, making it seem like the menage speaker to prescript them all.

But spell all the makings of an Essential ecosystem are ready to go on paper, all we have are promises. There isn't a house release date for the phone (though Rubin hopes to send on it inside 30 days), and fair a uninominal mod is presently on tap for pre-order. And without a price or even a vague launching windowpane, the Home verbaliser is even further off from release than the phone. I'm not implying that the Essential Phone is going to be vaporware, only if Rubin's name wasn't pledged I'd be extremely skeptical. Between the phone, the high-priced mod, and the family speaker that seems too good to be true, it's hard to not go steady shades of LeEco in Essential. Creating an ecosystem from the ground up is no easy task, and Essential might comprise biting off more than than it can chew here.

A band obscure

There's a ground why the Galaxy S phones are out and away the most favourite in the Mechanical man universe: availableness. Walk into whatever carrier operating room major sales outlet and you'll see a big display for the Galaxy S8 (usually right next to the iPhone), something you South Korean won't find for the Pixel.

pixel phone table — Verizon exclusivity has hindered adoption of the Pixel call.

Android enthusiasts may try out unlatched phones, merely the vast majority of consumers still bargain their phones from brick-and-mortar carrier shops. And while Matter claims that its phone testament work crosswise all carriers, information technology remains to constitute seen how far that extends beyond the ability to make phone calls. Wireless providers are already cautioning against full support for the Essential.

If you're disbursal $700 on a new phone, you'atomic number 75 going to deficiency about assurances that IT volition work equally intended on your network. Rubin has said atomic number 2 wants to bestow broad carrier support, merely so bash the Huaweis and Xiaomis of the world, and they've been stymied for years. If an unlocked phone successful by Google struggles to earn a dent in the market without all-inclusive carrier wave support, information technology's problematic to imagine Essential cracking that code, even with whol the honourable bands.

The great unknowns

For all the aid it gets, there's very much approximately the Substantive Ring that we assume't know. The biggest question is assault and battery life history. With a 3,040mAh battery, it's around the same size as the Galaxy S8's, but Essential doesn't tout any battery-life claims on its locate. In fact, it's amazingly Chrysanthemum morifolium on its stamp battery, and you consume to striking up the specification sheet to see anything about it.

essential os — The Essential Phone will patently flow from a "pure" variant of Humanoid Nougat.

But the biggest unknown is the OS. Like the battery, there's no a mention of it on the Substance place, simply saying information technology runs Android in the Arrangement Architecture/OS section of the specifications page. Rubin has said in interviews that the Crucial Phone leave run a version of Nougat 7.1.1 that's "unmixed as the compulsive snow, with no bloatware or bespoken interface," which sounds fantastic. But what about updates? Will the Essential Phone get Android O close to the Lapplander sentence that the Pixel does? Will Matter take Google's lead and finally bring rapid updates and smooth performance to a third-political party phone?

The Pixel changed the game when it came to Android updates. Google's engineering artistry ready-made its first earphone a beautiful marriage of hardware and software, and we've yet to see a handset that bottom competitor it in terms of OS performance. That alone could make the Essential Phone the best Android phone around, but IT's a grandiloquent order to think that a start-up phone maker derriere get wise right field (even one helmed by Rubin), especially when heavyweights like LG and Samsung take over struggled so mightily.

Jacked up

For everything that Essential is promising with its new phone, there's one and only thing you South Korean won't puzzle over: a headphone jack. Instead you'll get a USB-C dongle, a atomic number 57 the iPhone 7.

htc u ultra sound — The HTC U Extremist compensates for its lack of a headphone jack up with superior USB-C audio.

Apple may have been able to get away this (although sales of the handset haven't exactly been robust), but it's sporty one Sir Thomas More unnecessary hurdle for the Essential Phone to have the best. And if otherwise Android phones are any indicant, customers aren't buying it. For example, HTC took a similar tack with its U series of phones, but equal with higher-up vocalize, the U Radical didn't exactly fly off shelves. Essential doesn't offer some rhyme or cause for removing the jack (not even a florid bit of rhetoric), so presumably it's strictly for the sake of simplicity.

And that's one thing Essential has in spades. From the lack of a logo to the barely-there bezel, Rubin's latest fancy is for certain a thing a beauty, looking like a work of nontextual matter in the renders. But the question stiff: If it can't solve at least some of these issues, is some other questionable premium Android telephone set really that essential to Humanoid's future?