Gadgetory

some phones demand your attention this phone the essential phone was made bad team and led by the creator of Android itself Andy Rubin he has a brand new billion-dollar company that's trying to create a whole new operating system for the connected world and a smart home device that will run on it but before all that happens this phone has to happen it runs Android and it costs six hundred and ninety nine dollars but it feels like a million bucks and it has an all new wireless module system and the camera well we'll get to that but first pay attention I mean just look at this the striking design starts of course with the screen it goes all the way to the top with a cutout that accommodates the selfie camera and a couple of little sensors it goes very nearly to the edges of the sides without any gimmicky curves and on the bottom it does have a little chin but it's not much bigger than what you'd get on say a samsung galaxy you should know that it's LCD instead of AMOLED which means it won't work for VR if you care about that sort of thing but what's most impressive about the 5.7 inch screen is that it's bigger than the screen on the pixel XL or the iPhone 7 plus but in a package that's way smaller than either one now I know what you're thinking is it this weird Cyclops eye or selfie camera in the middle of the screen annoying in a word no in more words it basically becomes invisible once you start using it because Android never puts anything in that zone of the screen look I'm just going to say it the essential phone has an aesthetic that I like better than any other phone I've tried in the past year I really like that this isn't just some derivative knockoff of an iPhone or a galaxy phone it's it's only thing the essential phone feels substantial feel dense it's pretty much the same weight as an iPhone 7 plus but in this much smaller package I do wish it was waterproof though there's nothing here to distract from the clean lines of the device there's no camera bump and the earpiece speaker is the tiny thin rail you don't even see until the lead charging light turns on and of course there are any logos on it anywhere at all the rail on the edge is titanium and it rides the line of being just dripping enough to instill confidence the back is ceramic which cuts down on antenna lines and it's also I have to admit glossy as all get-out and it shows every little smudge and fingerprint but at least it wipes down easily essential says that all these materials will keep this thing from shattering if you drop it or scratching in your pocket but we didn't actually test those things sorry there isn't a headphone jack and I know that's the way things are going but I'm still going to be a curmudgeon about it here's the USBC dongle a nice dongle but once I left this dongle and my bluetooth headphones at the office and so I was out of luck oh and the fingerprint sensor it's on the back in middle where you can actually reach it where it belongs Samsung and here we come to it the most important part really of any Android phone review a camera hey everybody you may have noticed I'm not wearing a suit and I'm in an office with Verein behind the camera and Tyler editing the video you're watching right now here's the story a mere hours for we needed to publish this review essential pushed out a software update for the camera which changed the quality of its photos from dumpster fire to pretty good this is the section the video we're going to tell you about the camera so I will there's actually two lenses on the back one is black and white the other one is color and they combine the two images together to make a better photo than you'd get from either one on its own and it means that there's no camera bump so I compared it to a pixel XL and the pixel cell is still way faster and this pictures are slightly better so we're gonna go back to the rest of the video we're going to talk about the modules and everything else that's going on with this phone and then at the end I'm going to come back to the camera a little bit and what I say there at the end it's still true but if I had the original software that I have now I might not have been quite so I don't know emotional about it so check it out there's one more interesting thing to talk about with the essential phone and it's related to these two little metal pins on the back just like Motorola essential is trying to get you to buy a bunch of modules but the centrioles approach is potentially more exciting what Motorola is doing these two little metal contacts here are just for providing power the data is transmitted over wireless USB and the modules attach Maya magnets the first module that essential shipping is a 360-degree camera which costs $1.99 Izone but you can get it bundled with a phone for 50 bucks for a limited time it's an intriguing little widget it doesn't need its own battery or display or Bluetooth radio so it's super small it attaches via those magnets with a really pleasing firm snap and when you do it automatically fires up the phone's camera also hilarious plot twist when you attach the 360 camera to the back of the essential phone a tiny little fan spins up in the camera to keep the electronics cool now it doesn't actually do it while you're actually recording so it's not really a problem but kind of weird right once the camera app is open you can shoot 360 stills or video in 4k and even stream live it works but sometimes it is a little bit buggy for now the best thing I can say about it is that it's a really fun toy but we have to compare its actual quality to other 360 cameras we just haven't had enough time to do that yet so I haven't bothered to talk about the usual phone specs and software stuff because essentially basically did all the obvious and right things it's running on the same modern hardware that you can get on other fly shop Android phones it has a Qualcomm 835 processor and has all the radio bands need to work on any US carrier plus plenty more for around the rest of the world there's four gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage so you cannot expand it I've been getting better battery life than usual for big Android phones this thing is easily lasting through a whole day for me with up to 7 hours of screen on time as for the software essential basically did nothing to Android 7.1 here there is a custom camera app and the bits to enabled and of course there's a setting to send Diagnostics act of the company and that's literally it anyway I popped a sprint stem into the bottom of this thing and sure enough there was zero crap where and sprint tells me he'll be exactly the same if you buy one of these phones directly from a Sprint store so seriously everybody Bravo I guess I should say that it doesn't necessarily have the fine-tuning of the pixel and you do miss out on some of the neat little tricks that the galaxy can do but whatever I didn't miss it there are a lot of stories you could tell about the essential phone you could say it's a luxury phone for people who care about something with a unique design and high-end materials you could say it's the tip of the spear for Annie Rubens grand plan to create the next great platformer that comes after mobile you could say it's the new harbinger of the return of modular gadgets where you can plug little things into your phone and your TV and your thermostat anything else you can think of you could say it's a phone that's snuck in right before the pixel xl2 and beat Google at its own game if it works with a disappointing camera that might have been the story that I'm telling you right here and maybe it could be someday with a software update but we've heard that software update story before and it usually doesn't turn out well so I think the most likely story for the essential phone is that it's a phone you really want to love but it keeps breaking your damn heart and yeah it's a fine screen it's not a concealer thick film and really good responsible okay yeah okay ready you