Gadgetory

a forefather of Android has brought a new smartphone vision to life and we have been able to use this latest creation for the last few days a phone with basically no branding high-end specifications supposed future proofing and a future full of possibilities a phone that begs the question posed in its own name what is truly essential this is Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and this is our first look at the essential phone it's one of the most anticipated phones of the year so it's interesting to see that the device was such hype is actually quite understated our time at the playground where the phone was conceived and developed wasn't full of fanfare or grandiose presentations but rather a deeper look into the philosophy that birthed the essential phone and after a number of demos showcasing the phones various features we were greeted with what will be the sales kiosks for the essential phone eye catching to be sure but definitely not all that in your face and the device itself continues this kind of projection the smartphone comes in black and white glossy and matted in texture respectively and none of the devices have any sort of branding on them despite the exclusive carrier rights afforded to Sprint and with the screen off first glances at the essential show a slab of tech just waiting to show you what it can do so let's get straight to the marquee feature powering up the phone makes it clear off the bat that this phone is incredibly different a 5.7 inch quad HD display is sprawled out on as much of the device as it possibly can be making for a 19 by 10 aspect ratio and some of the most minimal bezels we've ever seen all that really breaks the immersion is a 8 megapixel front-facing camera which has been given its own space at the top that Peaks out from the top of the screen but even that little bit of interruption just adds to even more uniqueness and the design of this phone the titanium and ceramic combination seemed to be holding up quite well I did go through a couple of accidental spills very small drops though with this phone especially since the ceramic material tends to slip about a little bit too easily but as essential has touted the titanium body holds up pretty well and definitely is not dented or scratched in any way what might be a little bit surprising is that this 5.7 inch display is actually pretty easy to handle in one hand and I think that's due to the body more than anything the flat sides make for a phone that is easy to grip and the phone manages to not that need to be too narrow or too tall and you still get quite a bit Real Estate's the display has been performing quite well and even in broad daylight I've been able to see everything with the brightness cranked all the way up to maximum but there's a little bit of trickery going on when it comes to the UI and that notification bar at the top of course it's trying to bleed all the way to the top of the device and a number of applications actually try to take advantage of it for example Gmail will actually change the notification bar to a red color and that shows in the essential phone's UI however there are other applications that don't take advantage of that API just yet they have to get updated in order to do so and Facebook is our main example right now and when notifications come down they tend to have a little bit more white space above the actual text then you might be used to with your more conventional device by powering all of this is the Snapdragon 835 with 4 gigabytes of RAM and one interesting development was the move to 128 gigabytes of internal storage throughout which is good because you can't use SD cards now here's where the semantics come into play what exactly does essential mean well you can argue that the word essential is not being used in this particular category because there's no headphone jack instead an adapter for the USB C port has to be used and you can argue that not having a headphone jack is the very opposite of essential as far as the battery goes you get a capacity of 3040 milliamp hours which we will be testing for a full review but you might not need to use fast charging via the USB C cable that comes with the phone as there are going to be other ways of charging the phone via the connector pins this is where the essential ads in the modularity that has been touting ever since its inception unfortunately the essential 360 modular camera is a bit delayed but that is the main accessory that essential has available right now it's going to take 360 photo and video and be able to pass through via those connector pins an essential says that they will have plenty more accessories where that came from including a charging dock that will use those connector pins in order to do basically wireless charging but without the 360 camera you still have the built-in dual 13 megapixel cameras this combination puts together an RGB and monochrome sensor in order to get the most detail out of the pictures and we will admit taking mono photos is actually pretty fun because there's a lot of detail in these black-and-white pictures the color pictures are still coming out fairly well but we're going to do our full on all of those photos for our full review which is important to say because even at the time that I am putting together this video there was an OTA that went out that updated the camera app which is fairly simplistic and is missing a manual mode and the update added HDR and finally we can talk about the software which is actually a big highlight of this phone so far with envy Reubens named part of the essentials being it should come as no surprise that the company has put some real thought into what the Android iteration would look like simplicity minimalism and honestly essentialism are all part of the philosophy here so I was happy to see one of the lightest versions of Android ever representatives at essential posited that aside from androids intrinsic applications only about a half dozen are further added on top so you get a really lightweight version of Android with only the essential applications installed and the result has been a very speedy and smooth experience so if there's one essential piece to the puzzle the lightweight but totally functional Android software basically nails it ultimately the essential phone feels like a phone trying to cater to too many people at once all of whom have different definitions of the word essential essential could mean everyday specifications and features that no one can live without or these visions of modularity easy to harness 360 media and a screen that just won't quit could become the essentials reaching for both makes the essential a continuously intriguing phone to use and over the last few days I've had a good time with what has been a pretty reliable phone so far but we still have to test out what the camera will truly be like and how long the battery will last among other things it is unassuming at first but then bursts with capability so we will see where the lines are drawn in our testing of the essentials for our full review keep it tuned to Android or thority for even more on the essential phone we might do some comparisons but you can definitely stay tuned for our full review so you can see if this is the phone that you have been waiting for there's definitely a lot of hype around it so stay tuned to see more about the essential phone at Android Authority because we are your source for all things Android