Gadgetory

so here it is the moment you've all been waiting for from the original posts that I put on Instagram and Twitter I showed you this phone I've gotten so many tweets lose when are you gonna show us the essential bone it's an unusual design it's a new look it's a new company it's got the Heritage this company here it's got the backing of one of the original guys behind Android as an operating system Andy Rubin they've come together to create this device that's a clean new look a new take on the Android flagship so I'm incredibly excited to have partnered with Telus to get my hands on this device early and that is the carrier that you will be able to exclusively by the essential phone from if you are in Canada so mine is the black variant it will come in a few different colors you can check those out on their website and there will also be a kit version of this that will ship with a 360 camera which clips onto the back of this device similar to the Moto mod effect that it happens to be the world's smallest 360 camera and it just clips on to your phone so you're ready to use that footage immediately oh that's a bit of an unboxing experience right there it's all laid out it's almost got an iconic appearance to it now with this cutout at the top for the front-facing camera a USB type-c cable and this is a braided cable a headphone adapter USB type-c 2 mini Jack can you see the mini jack Jack a power brick also I believe that's the most powerful brick I've ever seen with a smartphone 27 watts this is gonna be capable of giving five hours of juice to the device with a five minute charge so that's pretty impressive there it is this is a nice that's a nice phone whoa it feels really luxurious everything is embedded nothing protrudes on the back you can see the dual lens system up here the fingerprint reader there we have the volume up and down as well as the power slash lock switch the SIM card tray type-c connector and the speaker as well now the construction here on the outside is titanium making this probably the first titanium phone I've ever held as well they compared it to similar aluminum phones dropped on concrete the difference is is when it's tougher to dent so they've used ceramic here as well as Gorilla Glass 5 now these two connectors up in the top right corner that's where the magic happens with the various accessories that we'll be able to clip on to there including the 360 camera that I mentioned earlier it clips on in this location sits above the phone a little bit and apparently it's the smallest 360 camera on planet earth let's take a look at this display it's a qHD display and I'm expecting a fairly slick Android experience here we're also gonna test out this fingerprint scanner on the back I'll add a fingerprint right now whew that was fast I didn't know how much I was gonna like this cut out at the top obviously like I said that's kind of the standout way to distinguish this phone it's got this incredible screen to body ratio so check this out I'll show you the speed of the fingerprint one thing I will say this one is so flat across the back you're kind of like wondering for a second if you're on top of it but it's obviously a huge step ahead of the galaxy s 8 because that one is a weirder thing to reach it's an odd shape and the cameras in that location as you know not a huge fan of the implementation of the fingerprint reader on the SI so obviously a very clean OS here also it's basically pixel it's basically stock that's wild things actually get close to that cutout at the top the little icon there okay so for video let's see what happens I turn it this way ah so that's how they get around the cutout issue is you actually get a bit more bezel here to grab on to so it kind of moves it in a little bit so I suppose that could have been a concern for people is like if that would influence your video viewing experience but all they do is shift the video this way a little bit and then match it up on the other side so you have a similar bezel there that you can grab now comes to these extreme screen to body ratios you've seen what Samsung has done with the SAE and the unusual aspect ratio and then of course it doesn't necessarily match up with the video aspect ratio we're seeing some interesting implementations of how to consume media on these devices with these incredible screen to body ratios I have to say this might be my favorite haptic feedback I've ever had on a device so here's what I was talking about regarding the drop test the reason that titanium was used they outline it a little bit more on their website but there's an image here which Jack can see there now where they tested this device against some of the competitors with aluminum shells apparently the titanium on the essential fared better dropping onto concrete I suppose that's good I mean after all I know so many people that drop their phones having a material like titanium is probably a good thing now another thing that I haven't mentioned but it's standing out to me right now is the fact that this device has absolutely no branding on it did you notice that look at this thing there's not a single logo on there which is very unusual I don't know it's never happened before what am I talking about I've never held a phone on this channel without a logo somewhere on it or some kind of writing how did they manage that you don't even have the government you know the serial number the FCC there's nothing it's nowhere on there this idea of not having to advertise the brand of the device that you're using if you're somebody who's into the most simple designs possible then I mean you would probably never choose to have text or branding on your device certainly for people in that camp this has got to be your only choice at the moment I would assume unless there's some other phone out there but as I said I certainly haven't seen it it hasn't come across this table so this dual lens system on the back of the essential phone is apparently the world's slimmest of any system like this in this case you have one that's monochrome one that's color and it doesn't protrude at all unlike some competitors which I'm sure you're aware of all right so that covers the cameras on the back but what about this guy on the front the one that's getting all the attention this is still a significant camera here it's capable of eight megapixel photos and 4k video okay so for the usual camera test here let's go in and snap a photo of you guys looking at me here boom and then I'm gonna also test the monochrome sensor now the reason they've gone this route with the two lens system is to create better images in low light there's actually more information as opposed to what Apple is done in the latest iPhone 7 plus and likely the next iPhone where one of the lenses is zoom and the other one is a more standard format so the best way to think about it is they've gone for an emphasis on low-light performance video mode is controlled up in this section here and you can switch between 4k HD and 60 frames per second for fast-moving stuff I kind of want to test out the 4k mode okay so low light performance 4k video mode you can tell it's very dark over here let me take a quick walk over here this is dimly lit so this will give you a better idea of the sensor performance in a dark environment that's actually pretty impressive at least on the display here as you can see there's no lights on so a little bit more on the specs just to cover everything off it is a 5.7 inch display at 2560 by 1312 those two cameras on the back that I showed you earlier they're 13 megapixels each with one being the black-and-white sensor it's got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor four gigs of ram and it comes with a hundred and twenty eight gigabytes of internal storage the lens on the back is f 1.85 and the one on the front is f 2.2 it's also got bluetooth 5 oh and the battery is 3040 milliamp hours now software I know a lot of people were wondering when this phone was announced what software is it gonna ship with I obviously can't speak to that since this is not available retail yet but the version that mine has on it is 7.1.1 and in terms of the actual Android experience it's pretty much stock it apparently matte to Andy Rubin a great deal that there wouldn't be any bloatware on the phone so as you can see it's basically a stock experience swipe to the left and you see Google now it's all very familiar and comforting to be honest to not see any weirdness going on I think that aspect of the interface is going to be one of the major selling features of this particular device all right so the speaker it's one of these down firing things you guys know I'm not that you just fan of that if you could have forward-facing speakers it's gonna be better that said this type of design this whole screen to body ratio frenzy that's going on right now I mean I think the days of asking for for facing speakers is pretty numbered I mean you can see even with this device here they had to do a screen cut out just for the front facing camera imagine you had to try to jam speakers in there that we're facing front facing it'd be tough alright so who is this phone for I think Android purists are gonna be really excited about this thing because what you get out of the box is kind of Android as it was intended no fluff no extras hence the name essential alright but because of that there's a few things missing on here that you might have wanted that are in some other devices for example this one here is not waterproof and it doesn't have expandable storage so a lot of buyers that might not be such a big deal but it's something that you need to know about going into this maybe you get a little bit back from the durability angle when it comes to drops and the titanium and the ceramic and so on and maybe the overall build as a whole another thing to mention regarding the screen to body ratio Wars is the aspect ratio they've chosen to go with here of course you're probably familiar with the galaxy s 8 I made a few videos about it and as you can tell straight away it's got this slender aspect ratio on the screen that's not what you're met with when it comes to the essential this is a lot more familiar it doesn't roll off the edge and certainly when you're watching video it matches more closely to the aspect ratio you're used to with multimedia and one thing more to mention about the expandable storage at least with the essential phone you're coming out of the gate with 128 gigabytes so it's not like they're giving you low storage and then can't expand it it's already pretty substantial to begin with is that a silver lining it's a bit of a silver lining so obviously this is a brand new device in fact it's not even at retail yet and it does pack a Snapdragon 835 so it only makes sense to run a couple Network speed tests I want to see what it's pulling from the cell tower but before I do that I'll also check it on Wi-Fi we'll do a quick test here now of course this figure here is gonna be limited by your local network the router that you're using and so on all right now let's turn Wi-Fi off and we're gonna go with the LTE now okay okay okay get after it go on now so that's kind of interesting we actually did a far better download on LTE than we even did on our Wi-Fi that's pretty impressive to be clear this test is being performed north of Toronto we're on the Telus Network right now so there you have it your first look at the essential phone a completely new brand in the space obviously this is just an unboxing video I'm gonna spend some more time with this in fact if you guys would like to see a comprehensive review after I've had more time to use it let me know by leaving a thumbs up down below and I'll give you some more feedback from a daily use scenario I'm gonna pop my SIM card into here and see what it's really all about also if you'd like to preorder one of these essential phones be sure to check out the link in the description the details will be there so that you can be one of the first to get your hands on this device exclusively from Telus here in Canada