Gadgetory

Hey how's it going Dave QD here and this is the essential phone and I wanted to thank tell us for partnering with me on this video they're the exclusive launch carrier for this phone in Canada so if you're interested in the essential phone and you live in Canada you should check out their website there's a link in the description so I'm gonna start off with a quick unboxing here we get a slide-out tray inside and you get the phone itself a 27y charging brick a braided USBC cable and then a braided USBC headphone jack adapter you also get a sim tool shaped like the essential logo one of the headlining features of the phone is the build it's made from titanium and ceramic and when I first heard that essential was doing this with their phone it didn't seem that special I mean it sounded cool but I didn't think that the build materials would make that much of a difference in how the phone feels but it does titanium is a very hard metal if you look at the tensile strength of some metals titanium alloys can get way harder than even the best aluminum alloy so the frame should be pretty resistant to damage the ceramic slab on the back is also super durable I thought it was glass at first because it's so shiny but it's actually polished ceramic and this surface is very resilient to scratches I'm not going to call it scratch proof because there's very few things on this world that are actually scratch proof but my keys can't mark the surface at all and I think they've done a really good job combining the two materials it's a very nice device to hold in your hand in terms of the design it's a very simple and clean aesthetic it's comfortable to hold but because of the ceramic material it's heavier than you would imagine a phone of this size to weight it's not heavy per se it's just heavier than you might think it would be the earpiece is pretty much invisible it's tucked away into the tiny crevice between the screen and the ceramic perimeter there's a notification LED tucked in there and the earpiece sounds good the fingerprint scanner on the back is quick I can hear the verification sound right away but sometimes the screen can take a split-second to fire up on the back there are two contact points and these are where the wireless accessories can connect these pins are just for power any kind of data transfer is done wirelessly and there's a 360-degree camera module that looks pretty cool there's no headphone jack and even though they give you this USBC adapter I still miss the headphone jack but that's the past that's the past that the entire phone industry has chosen to take and will to live with that in terms of the speaker at the bottom it sounds pretty good and it gets loud but it is a mono speaker and I really wish the gun for a stereo setup it's just something I really like when it comes to smartphone speakers now if there's one thing I would knock about the design it would be the back panel it looks almost too simple to me there's no branding or design lines but you can always put skins on the back to give it some texture and some grip this is a marble one from D brand I think it looks nice alright let's talk about the screen this phone caught a lot of people's attention because of the screen it has very thin bezels it has rounded corners but the camera is still positioned at the top and you have this gap or cutout in the screen where the camera is and some people may not like it because it looks so different from your regular smartphone but I think it looks good now if you're wondering why they didn't put the camera at the bottom if you're taking a picture or using Google hands this is what the image looks like with the camera at the top it's a normal image but then we put at the bottom this is what the image looks like it's just a bad angle you can look up your nose you can still swipe down from the top of the camera and it works the same you don't have to adjust your swipes because of it and when you're watching videos it's just a black bar along the side the image doesn't have to go up to that part and when you're browsing the web using the cameras playing games very few apps actually put content up there you might have a strip of UI buttons or something but most apps just have a black bar so functionally right now this super thin bezel at the top doesn't do anything super useful but where this thing shines is base level UI so the lockscreen homescreen and settings and stuff it just looks so cool to me and every time I use my phone it feels like a very futuristic device the display itself is an IPS panel quad HD resolution the colors are on point but it's not super bright there with a 500 nits screen excellent for indoor use but the screen can get hard to see on really bright days looking at performance if the components in here are very fast it's got a Snapdragon a35 adrenal 540 with fast u FS 2.1 storage all the technical components in here were obviously picked to give this thing some really good speed the performance feels like a 2017 flagship phone one thing I noticed this phone doesn't get that hot so even after running a bunch of loops and stuff for benchmarks it felt cool to the touch not like cold but lukewarm at most I'm not sure if it's a ceramic material or something but yeah it's kind of neat the camera has two lenses one is an RGB sensor the other is a monochrome sensor and the idea here is that they're taking two photos and then combining the data to produce something that's as clean as possible and the images are pretty good now to be honest I thought that the essential phone wouldn't have an amazing camera because they don't emphasize it that much on the website but they're good photos taken in good lighting are nice not that these are difficult to capture with a 20-17 flagship but the low-light photos are also not bad dynamic range could be better in general but overall I do like the camera I'm not into black-and-white photography but it has a dedicated monochrome option I don't love the stock camera app it's a little too basic if you're big on photography you'll probably want a different camera app the front-facing camera looks good as well and both cameras the front and back shoot video in 4k pricing off-contract isn't cheap it's a premium 128 gigabyte phone it starts $700 in the US and I think 1050 in Canada it's on par with any big-screen flagship phone I wish they offer this phone in a cheaper 64 gig variant but $700 for a titanium thin bezel phone like this feels very normal right now battery life on this thing is average - maybe a little bit less than average because of the bigger screen so normally screens of this size are fueled by bigger batteries right but because it's a small phone with a large screen the battery is only 3040 milliamp hours so it's not huge I can comfortably get a full day of heavy use but not much more than that it does support quick charge and it takes about an hour and a half for a full charge it's running Android 7.1.1 and it feels very stock to me which I love the two apps that they've included that aren't very stock are their profile migration app it's called switch back I never used it and their camera app it's called click and I don't love the icon and like I mentioned before it's not a very full-featured camera app but everything else feels like stock Android as for updates I can't tell I mean every phone company promises an unending stream of super fast updates but they often don't deliver as for this one because of Andy Rubens involvement my gut feeling of that will get pretty fast and frequent updates essential does promise two years of major software updates and then another year of security updates and even this pre-release phone this thing did receive the August 5th update on time so that's probably a good sign okay give central phone with this devices you're getting excellent ergonomics and build quality the titanium and ceramic materials are really nice up front the ultra thin bezels look really cool it's not highly functional but it adds to the super clean aesthetic of the film the front facing and rear cameras are both strong performers clean images even in low-light the fingerprint scanner is reasonably quick and the ceramic material in the back gives the phone a very unique feel but it adds a little bit of weight inside the snapdragon 835 delivers awesome performance as expected the storage is also really fast but the phone only comes in a massive 128 gig variant so you're forced to go pretty big and the battery will last about a day of heavy use so the feature list isn't massive it's missing things like wireless charging it doesn't have official waterproofing so if you're trying to like one-up your friends with spec lists on your phone this is not that phone there are plenty of other phones for that but with this thing you're getting a highly functional device that has all the important specs but it looks and feels very unique and just straight-up awesome ok that about wraps it up if you guys are interested in this phone there's a link in the video description if you're in Canada check out tell us they're the exclusive launch partner for this company ok hope you enjoy this video thumbs if you liked it sub to be loved it see you guys next time you