Essential Phone (Andy Rubins Phone)

[shango]

Whats the verdicts?
Essential Products | My Phone is Essential
Quite like the look of it
Not liking the trend of dropping 3.5mm jack though

 

[bash]

I'm surprised the AVforums gadget addicts crew have not given their opinions yet. I think it looks great, in particular
the green/gold colour variant,
no logo and near bezel-less design with wrap-around-the-FF-camera screen.
I'm not sold on the 360 camera add-on, dont have a use for it personally and it looks very mk1 in design.
Also a surprising lack of software boasting, all we know it will ship with Android 7.1.1 but Im sure it'll have some kind of skin to make use of the full screen real estate.
Not being IP68 rated is very disappointing for the price, we almost expect our flagship devices to have that now.
oh and 4gb ram (do we need that or is it for future proofing?) and 128gb storage is nice

Im waiting for the battery life and camera quality results. Theres still a lot we dont know but we wont have too long to find out.

 

[shango]

They have said it will be completely vanilla android. But you'd think it would need some kind of mods for the camera in screen
Don't really need that much ram but the competition have it so I guess they have to for that reason alone.

Be interesting to see what else they come up with for the attachments, it's not really picked up pace with LG or moto

 

[bash]

You'd think they'd have shown off lots of attachments during launch so to only have a 360 camera (as impressive as it may be) shows that maybe they were not able to get partners on board with them?

 

[gbjbaanb]

It'll be a failure. The notch for the camera is quite daft, and would only realistically work if the bit of screen area either side of it was separate from the main screen. People have mentioned playing games that don't recognise the notch as not being too good a thing. A flip-up camera on a stalk that can be tucked into the bezel would have made more sense.

The modular system - well fine, but I doubt they'll get many modules for it. Someone said that interchangeable backs would be better for modularity, so you could have a better camera, or battery or fold-out keyboard or whatnot. LG and Moto failed for the same reasons - modularity without being able to get the modules people want make for failure.

A review: The modular Essential Phone, built by the father of Android, is real

 

[Garioch]

Whats the verdicts?
Essential Products | My Phone is Essential
Quite like the look of it
Not liking the trend of dropping 3.5mm jack though

I think it's an interesting, minimalist design and curious to read the reviews. I'm not sure how I feel about this trend towards bezeless designs; I cover my phones in chunky armour casing and I've seen some third party cases obstruct the screen. That said - I notice that essential use titanium edges and don't recommend external cases.

Personally... 4gb RAM feels low to me when 6gb and 8gb models are coming out. Some people have said anything higher than 4gb is excessive but it depends on how you use your phones.

Lastly, I would've liked to have seen an AMOLED screen but I'll reserve judgement until the reviews come out. The modularity aspect looks cool but as mentioned above - it all depends on whether the extra devices have any merit.