As an early adopter of devices I have pre-ordered many of phones and electronics. The promise of an essential phone that handed you a pure android experience with out all the BS was exciting. I mean, who couldn't resist Andy Rubin's musings about giving us a sturdy, sexy phone that would last for years? It was to be Android's iPhone.
It is not. It is a cold hard tablet made of titanium and ceramic (with a disgusting plastic rim around the screen that constantly dings and scratches) that is suppose to be close to invincible. It is not. After 3 weeks mine slipped from my work slacks onto the tile floor at the office. It cracked. I was sitting down in a rather low chair (approximately 2 feet) with a slight lean back. Thanks for the ceramic backing that is incredibly slippery! My screen shattered into 1.1 billion pieces with sharp glass and chunks making half the phone unusable with out slicing the tips of the fingers to shreds! (this is exaggeration) But the point is the phone is less sturdy than say my original Pixel which I dropped multiple times before the rear glass broke (not the front screen).
Maybe a rigid titanium and ceramic backing is a terrible idea. When you shove glass into a rigid square you make it much more prone to breaking because the energy pass through is more intense than it would be with say, an aluminum phone.
Oh well, I bought insurance for a reason. I did contact customer services to complain that the phone should not break with a single drop that hit a corner but they said "accidents happened." Not when their website promises a break free drop on concrete!
Asurion sent me a brand new phone, in a brand new shrink wrapped box within a week. (That was a bloody week for my fingers). On that topic the box looks like one of those cheaply designed boxes from Thaihland when you purchase non-name branded electronics from Thailand. That is to say, the box is essentially ugly.
Back to the phone - That beautiful body does look rather dashing on your desk. When google now or the home screen is open the brilliantly shaped screen with the small camera notch looks futuristic and splendid. It reminds me of what Motorola tried to do with the Droid series in 2012 - cold, hard, strong, bold, and anDROID.
The problem with designing something that has a cutout in the screen is that almost no apps support the black bar at the top. This leads to an ugly mess 90% of the time you use the phone. After more than a month with the phone there had been no updates to apps to fill in the screen. So, the phone is only beautiful when left on the home screen or google now. I would suspect many apps do not care to fix this.
Once you get over how beautiful the home screen looks you have to pick it up - because the near bezeless edges make this phone so thin and so short like it could be used with one hand! Well you can't. Seriously you cannot. Not only is the phone so heavy but it makes your workout shorts want to come off while running. The back design is so poorly thought through because there is no design! It's literally a right angle edge all the way around making this behemoth feel huge. It's very, very (that's a lot of very) difficult to hold with one hand. There's a reason almost no phone in the past 2 years has tried this design and maybe Andy should have paid attention.
The final issue I'd like to highlight is probably the most important of all. The radios in this phone are incredibly bad. Wifi signals are short range (half of the pixel 2 and pixel xl) and the switching between Wifi and data is miserably slow at times. Google itself only made a promise to work on handoff from Wifi to data a year or so ago (looking to copy iPhone). So the concept is new to android phones, but I cannot forgive the essential phone for how bad the connection is. You could shut the door of your bedroom 15 feet from the router and lose all your connection (even when ever other wifi connected device in your house works).
Like many people, the unlocked phones are great because we can say "Screw you!" to the man (phone company) and jump between carriers any day we want. Too bad the essential phone can barely work on T-Mobile. I admit that is the only carrier I have used it on but with my Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Moto Z, and One Plus 3T I've had great service in the same exact locations at the same exact time. So why can't the Essential phone keep up with these other flagships and the 3T budget phone? I don't know who to blame here, the architecture designer and use of old radios or the industrial designer who thought it was a great idea to use ceramic and titanium on a phone; making the radio waves bounce inside of dense metals and glass never to escape to the light of day! (long sentence).
So lets be honest with ourselves. The ideas that were spun by Andy himself were amazing, wonderful, delightful, and down right exciting, but this phone is not the one Andy released to the public. This phone that he got us giddy like a kid on Christmas eve is not the essential phone. (It's probably the Pixel 2 XL)
P.S. Don't buy the 3D camera either. It's overpriced and can only run 20 minutes before overheating.
It is not. It is a cold hard tablet made of titanium and ceramic (with a disgusting plastic rim around the screen that constantly dings and scratches) that is suppose to be close to invincible. It is not. After 3 weeks mine slipped from my work slacks onto the tile floor at the office. It cracked. I was sitting down in a rather low chair (approximately 2 feet) with a slight lean back. Thanks for the ceramic backing that is incredibly slippery! My screen shattered into 1.1 billion pieces with sharp glass and chunks making half the phone unusable with out slicing the tips of the fingers to shreds! (this is exaggeration) But the point is the phone is less sturdy than say my original Pixel which I dropped multiple times before the rear glass broke (not the front screen).
Maybe a rigid titanium and ceramic backing is a terrible idea. When you shove glass into a rigid square you make it much more prone to breaking because the energy pass through is more intense than it would be with say, an aluminum phone.
Oh well, I bought insurance for a reason. I did contact customer services to complain that the phone should not break with a single drop that hit a corner but they said "accidents happened." Not when their website promises a break free drop on concrete!
Asurion sent me a brand new phone, in a brand new shrink wrapped box within a week. (That was a bloody week for my fingers). On that topic the box looks like one of those cheaply designed boxes from Thaihland when you purchase non-name branded electronics from Thailand. That is to say, the box is essentially ugly.
Back to the phone - That beautiful body does look rather dashing on your desk. When google now or the home screen is open the brilliantly shaped screen with the small camera notch looks futuristic and splendid. It reminds me of what Motorola tried to do with the Droid series in 2012 - cold, hard, strong, bold, and anDROID.
The problem with designing something that has a cutout in the screen is that almost no apps support the black bar at the top. This leads to an ugly mess 90% of the time you use the phone. After more than a month with the phone there had been no updates to apps to fill in the screen. So, the phone is only beautiful when left on the home screen or google now. I would suspect many apps do not care to fix this.
Once you get over how beautiful the home screen looks you have to pick it up - because the near bezeless edges make this phone so thin and so short like it could be used with one hand! Well you can't. Seriously you cannot. Not only is the phone so heavy but it makes your workout shorts want to come off while running. The back design is so poorly thought through because there is no design! It's literally a right angle edge all the way around making this behemoth feel huge. It's very, very (that's a lot of very) difficult to hold with one hand. There's a reason almost no phone in the past 2 years has tried this design and maybe Andy should have paid attention.
The final issue I'd like to highlight is probably the most important of all. The radios in this phone are incredibly bad. Wifi signals are short range (half of the pixel 2 and pixel xl) and the switching between Wifi and data is miserably slow at times. Google itself only made a promise to work on handoff from Wifi to data a year or so ago (looking to copy iPhone). So the concept is new to android phones, but I cannot forgive the essential phone for how bad the connection is. You could shut the door of your bedroom 15 feet from the router and lose all your connection (even when ever other wifi connected device in your house works).
Like many people, the unlocked phones are great because we can say "Screw you!" to the man (phone company) and jump between carriers any day we want. Too bad the essential phone can barely work on T-Mobile. I admit that is the only carrier I have used it on but with my Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Moto Z, and One Plus 3T I've had great service in the same exact locations at the same exact time. So why can't the Essential phone keep up with these other flagships and the 3T budget phone? I don't know who to blame here, the architecture designer and use of old radios or the industrial designer who thought it was a great idea to use ceramic and titanium on a phone; making the radio waves bounce inside of dense metals and glass never to escape to the light of day! (long sentence).
So lets be honest with ourselves. The ideas that were spun by Andy himself were amazing, wonderful, delightful, and down right exciting, but this phone is not the one Andy released to the public. This phone that he got us giddy like a kid on Christmas eve is not the essential phone. (It's probably the Pixel 2 XL)
P.S. Don't buy the 3D camera either. It's overpriced and can only run 20 minutes before overheating.
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