Gadgetory

the essential pH one essential pH one essential fo see what you I see what you did there hey what is up guys I'm Kim PhD here and this is the essential phone it's a new phone from a new company but with a not so new philosophy of just sticking with the essentials you know no bells and whistles no fancy widgets or crazy features or head-turning stuff just seven hundred dollars of the pure essentials I'll be using this phone for a little bit now and I have a pretty good idea of how well they did and whether you should buy one or not so that's what this video is so first of all the hardware is awesome and that's usually really hard for new companies to get right off the bat so I'm impressed here the essential phone feels great in the hand it's this all-black titanium and ceramic slab no protrusions at all no logos at all no branding or anything like that it's just an essential rectangle with rounded corners the titanium sides that material is actually a lot harder than your typical aluminum so that means you should hold up to chipping or any drops much better and the back which you could easily mistake for Gorilla Glass is not glass at all it is polished ceramic so that makes it much harder than glass making it way less likely to scratch it all but also theoretically making it more likely to break some ceramic is more brittle than Gorilla Glass basically what I'm saying is this would be a really interesting phone to drop test but no I won't I'll leave that to other channels well you will notice right out the box though is the ceramic makes the phone a bit heavier just more dense feeling in the hand and it's also a serious fingerprint magnet it's like a mirror finish which is super nice when it's clean but it will never be clean so definitely worth getting a deep brand skin on the back of this one and they can actually make the phone look a lot better than without the skin if you ask me this is one of those rare instances so I'll link to this matte black one right below that like button but long story short I liked the industrial design here it's simple not too flashy but obviously still has a signature look the only thing you're missing here is waterproofing a lot of other phones in this price range have some IP certification not this one maybe next year the favor this guy is actually pretty quick to recognize your finger but it always feels like there's a tiny delay when I actually turned the screen on and unlock the phone if you can see that it's not bad but you can definitely address that with a software update and the rest of the back of the phone is the mic and two pins for attaching small modular accessories and providing power through them so the one that exists right now is the world's smallest 360-degree camera it just snaps right into place with magnets on the phone which is really convenient so hopefully there are more mods added to their ecosystems sooner than later I don't have any of them right now but we'll have to wait and see how good that gets the speaker for those who care is it's actually really loud it gets very very loud but it's not like the best quality loud so there's no big dynamic range there's no bass or anything like that it's just really loud and it's also this small pretty blockable grill at the bottom of the phone and there's also no headphone jack anywhere on the essential phone so audio is clearly not a priority with this guy so yeah I guess the easiest joke to make about the essential phone is they didn't include a headphone jack which is essential to most people it seems kind of weird yes I do think they could have included one but they didn't welcome to 2017 I guess any way around the front is the 5.7 inch display with the sort of the signature look at this point the cutout in the top of the middle for the front-facing camera and the absolutely tiny bezels on the top and the sides originally I thought I wouldn't like this or it might get distracting or annoying but I can tell you right now that disapear is just a couple hours into using it and the phone looks awesome in my opinion with the thin bezels we just talked about this in the most recent video yes technically moving the display way up closer to the corners would seem to make it easier to damage it with a drop but the ceramic and titanium should also work against that and all the times that the phone isn't using the full display it just blocks out that bar to match the bottom bezel so it looks like a completely normal phone most of the time anyway it's also a quad HD display and it gets up to 500 nits so decently bright but not the brightest like I can see outdoors but I've seen better in fact the only real downside I can see with this screen is that it's not an OLED if it were an OLED you could do some cool tricks with totally blacking out the top and the bottom or you could do some cool wallpaper tricks where it fades to complete blackness up at the and you could do some cool essential tricks where you like only light up a display for notifications instead of the whole thing little things like that but it's not it's an LCD which you know that's just fine for now maybe next year but where this phone really lives up to the name the essential is in the software it is so clean this one is rockin basically stock Android 7.1.1 and I imagine it'll be getting Android 8.0 Oreo through a software update pretty soon it's already gotten two software updates since I got the thing and so once you get past the essential boot screen you get you know stock Google launcher stock Android notification shade just a couple google apps installed absolutely zero bloatware out the box the only third-party app installed on this phone when you get it is the camera app which we'll get to in a second so this is delivering essentially the exact same software experience as a pixel no extra features are buried in the settings no waving gestures or iris scanning no extra assistance or any of that the essential part in the settings is just to tick whether or not you want to send diagnostic data to the company or not it's just just Android it's clean the pure base essentials and so of course because of that performance is great I mean it's also because of the specs to you know Snapdragon 835 four gigs of ram you don't need the craziest specs to run pure android smoothly but this phone balls-out gaming is fine multitasking is fine hiccups aren't at zero but they're minimal and lag doesn't happen much at all except in the camera in fact you know what let's let's talk about the camera this is the weakest part of the device straight up so if you were looking for a reason not to buy this phone if you want to tell someone why not to buy it link them to this part of the video the essential phone actually has two cameras on the back a 13 megapixel color camera and a 13 megapixel monochrome camera and they're used together to enhance the detail and contrast and sharpness in everyday regular photos unfortunately most people will never actually notice this so the only other benefit just ends up being it can also take black-and-white photos in the camera app and the camera app is the only app that I've ever really seen lag hard on this phone and it's been pretty consistently slow it lags to take photos it lags when turning HDR on and off and it lags big-time when switching between modes if you have a lot of stuff going on so that's really disappointing and it's not even like it's a super complex camera app in fact it's one of the simplest camera apps possible every option available to change is shown on the screen right now so there's no other hidden settings there's no manual mode no pro mode this is it and then the photos themselves are pretty mediocre at best again you would think a phone at this price that adds a second sensor just to add detail and dynamic range would be great with the sharpness and photos something seems like it really focuses on photography but the photos from this phone are still soft they're lacking dynamic range they're noisy and anything but perfect lighting and often have the totally wrong exposure all together turning HDR on also didn't help as much as I thought it would you've seen HDR from other phones like the s8 and the pixel they're great but this one barely adds a little bit back to the highlights and that's it so the lacking camera and camera app here are pretty disappointing even the videos off it are really shaky and also disappointing the one thing about photos and videos though is they can be improved via software updates in fact that's usually the number one thing that gets the most improved over time with smartphones software updates but I've still never seen one go from not good to really good with just software updates so I feel pretty safe saying you're not gonna want to buy this phone for the camera well you should buy this phone for our the great stock software experience that's pretty obvious it's clean and pretty unique you could buy it for the premium build quality the ceramic and titanium as far as I can see aren't combined like this in any other smartphone you might even get it for the battery life this thing gets great battery life it's been really impressive for a 3040 milliamp hour battery and a 5.7 inch display but I keep getting four to four and a half hours of screen on time so it lasts comfortably all day you might even get it for just the little things you like about it the display the tiny notification LED right above the screen which gets a really bright or Bluetooth 5.0 or even the awesome accessories included in the box which are also first of all totally non branded no logo anywhere but also really high-quality and really cool to see a smartphone bundle Brady high-quality cables in the box that feel like they're gonna last a long time and a super high-powered 27 watt charger that goes extremely fast so the bottom line is what I would I recommend buying this phone and as much as I enjoyed using it probably not don't get me wrong it's awesome to see a new company get so much right in their first try but at the same time it is 700 bucks so it's kind of for me like it's floating around in that void of other really good smart phones from the established manufacturers for the same price you could get a Galaxy s8 that also has a software skin but also has a way better camera and also has waterproofing and a headphone jack all for the same price you could also get a Google pixel from last year which may have bigger bezels but it has better speakers and it gets the exact same software updates put way faster we can just wait for the new pixel to come out this year that will have smaller bezels and the new software so a central phone to me is a great episode one it's a great start and I'm excited for episode 2 when essential phone 2 comes out hopefully has 1 or 2 more distinguishing features at that price range that aren't proprietary mods and then I'll be really into it and I'll probably be more likely to recommend it but until then this is still really cool to see save your money thanks for watching talked to you guys the next one peace