The Essential Phone PH-1 is the latest must-have phone to be announced in 2017. It comes from the co-creator of Android itself. The PH-1 is compact and light, weighing less than 185 grams and 7.8mm thick. And we now have news that the Essential phone is currently on sale for $400 on Amazon.
Andy Rubin co-created Android, the smartphone operating system that powers 2 billion devices around the world. After leaving Google, he launched a new project: The Essential PH-1. It’s an Android smartphone, unsurprisingly, but one with an edge-to-edge screen, innovative accessories, and high-end materials that set it apart from the crowd. Read our Essential Phone review to hear our thoughts on the smartphone.
Fresh off the announcement of three new colors for the Essential Phone, Essential is already unveiling a fourth — Halo Gray. This phone offers more than just a new color, however — it’s also an Amazon Prime Exclusive device with Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa, installed right out of the box. According to Essential, you can uninstall Alexa if you so choose. The Halo Gray edition is available through Amazon for $500.
While the launch of the Essential Phone was a bit rough, things seem to have calmed down a little now — at least enough for the company to offer a significant price reduction, as well as the long-awaited white color option. The Essential Phone is currently available for $500, though the company has been offering intermittent discounts. If you bought the device early on for the original $700 price, Essential was offering a “friends and family code” you can use to get $200 in credit at the Essential store. This can be used to buy another Essential Phone, or a mod like the 360 camera — it’s unclear if the same policy still stands for this further price drop. The company said the reason for the price drop was to make the phone more accessible for everyone.
Not available as part of Amazon’s promotion, however, are the three new limited edition colors of the Essential Phone — that is to say, the Ocean Depths version of the phone, Stellar Grey, and Copper Black. These are only be available through the Essential website. Check out the images below to see what the new colors look like.
We previously got our hands on the Pure White version of the phone and it looks great.
The Essential Phone’s initial release was anything but smooth. Phones began shipping on August 25, with confirmation emails going out just a day later. Unfortunately, things soon took a strange and dismal turn. Some customers received emails earlier in the week requesting a photo ID — specifically a “driver’s license, state ID, or passport” — to verify against “unauthorized use of payment information.” The source was a legitimate Essential address, but due to an internal error, recipients were CC’d on each other’s emails — resulting in a flood of personal information freely circulating among people who bought the device.
Initially, it was assumed the company had suffered a security breach, and the email was an elaborate phishing scheme. A day later, founder Andy Rubin set the record straight, chalking the incident up to a “misconfigured account.”
“Yesterday, we made an error in our customer care function that resulted in personal information from approximately 70 customers being shared with a small group of other customers,” Rubin wrote in a blog entry on Essential’s website. “We have disabled the misconfigured account and have taken steps internally to add safeguards against this happening again in the future. We sincerely apologize for our error and will be offering the impacted customers one year of LifeLock. We will also continue to invest more in our infrastructure and customer care, which will only be more important as we grow.”
Essential played it surprisingly cool on social media immediately following the reports, simply commenting that an investigation was underway. It never urged customers to ignore the email, nor did it instruct them not to share their personal data.
The phone — which comes in black and white — costs $500.
All four major U. S. carriers will support the Essential Phone when it launches later this year. But only Sprint will sell it directly. Verizon certification is on the way.
For those who don’t live in the United States, the Essential Phone is now available on the company’s website for customers in Canada, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
The first sales figures for the Essential Phone have been revealed in a tweet by the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) research director Francisco Jeronimo, and they’re not good.
While it’s not clear what the sales expectations for the phone initially were, Essential’s price-drop-happy attitude over the last few months indicates that it was probably hoping for larger numbers over the first six months after release. The reception to this news on Twitter has been mixed, with some lamenting the inability for the U. S. market to buy anything other than Samsung or Apple phones, while others posited that selling almost 100,000 of anything as a startup was still a great achievement.
To offer context to the 88,000 units, Samsung sold 74.1 million units during the last quarter of 2017, selling millions more in half the time. But it’s clearly unfair to judge Essential by an established competitor’s standards. With prices of the Essential Phone being slashed and updates coming in thick and fast, there may still time for the new upstart to have an impact on the market.
The Essential phone is joined by a Moto Mod-style range of modular accessories, which attach using a combination of magnetic pins and a 60GHz wireless USB adapter on the device’s back. A couple of modules (which Essential calls “Click Connectors”) have been announced so far: A 360-degree camera, and a dock that charges the phone when it’s not in use.
Essential Charging Dock and High-End Audio
In a Reddit Q&A session on September 14, the Essential engineering team confirmed that two new Essential Phone accessories were in active development: A charging dock and a “high end [sic] audio accessory” that supports a 3.5mm jack.
“We are under development on a number of Click Connector accessories. The first available should be the charging dock,” and Essential team member wrote. “We are also actively developing a high end audio accessory to support a 3.5mm jack.”
A charging dock seems like a given, but the nature of the “audio accessory” isn’t entirely clear — the Essential Phone ships with a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle. And Essential didn’t volunteer a release date for either of the two upcoming accessories. But the team said it’s “continuing to look at supporting ideas,” and that it’s actively testing prototypes.
Essential Camera
The Essential Camera, which Essential claims is the “world’s smallest” 360-degree camera, attaches to magnets at the top of the phone’s body, allowing it to poke its “head” over the top of the phone. It weighs just 35 grams, and has two 12-megapixel lenses that can shoot 4K resolution, 30 fps video, as well as four microphones that capture sound in 3D. Following a tease that support for live-streaming would soon also be included, the Essential Camera has now made good on its promise.
You can stream in 360 degrees, first with Facebook Live, and soon, with Twitter Periscope. In order to take advantage of this new functionality, record live from the 360 Degree app, then log into your Facebook account to begin the stream. The camera also boasts spatial audio, which is to say that you can turn in different angles in order to hear different levels of sound coming from various directions. Streaming can either be in 4K or 2K, which you’ll decide upon before going live. You can read more about the ways to upload 360-degree content on an Essential blog post.
The a previous update for the Essential Phone brought portrait mode to the rear-facing camera, a feature available on the iPhone X, Pixel 2, and several other Android flagships. The update also offers stability updates and improves image quality by reducing JPEG compression. The latest update for the app (via Trusted Reviews) introduced much-needed auto-HDR, better dynamic HDR, and improved general performance and scene rendering.
Essential previously released an update to its camera app with several improvements. You’ll have to first install the latest system build (NMI81C) and then update the camera app through Google Play. The changes include boosted capture speed in regular and low light to below 1 second, countdown timer when in 360 camera mode, improved brightness and performance in low light, spatial sound when shooting in 360, the ability to use volume up and down keys as shutter buttons in 360 camera mode, and bug fixes.
