Finally got my essential and been using it for a full day. Coming from a Note 8, here are a few of my pros and cons.
pros:
Love the form factor. I don't feel like I am losing a lot of screen realestate with this phone since it has a baseless design. One thing I do hate is the screen is not as good as I hoped it would be. There is a bit of light bleed, but I got it for $250 so I'm not going to complain about it.
I don't consider myself an average user and have dabbled with rooting. With my Note 8, I've had to disable a lot of apps to get the pure Android feel. It's nice to just yet it out of the box without any bloatware. I do miss advance calling features like wifi calling (verizon). I think after using pure Android, I don't think I can go back. I don't think Samsung is bad in anyway the frequency with updates as well as the phone just working the way it should has won me over.
Camera to me is very good. I ported Google Camera and it's been working great for a day. I love the monochrome len!
Battery life is by far the best. Charging time is amazing. This phone lastest a day easily. Way better than the note 8 in that department.
Con:
With the pure Android version there are a few bugs I've experience. Picking up phone calls for some reason randomly goes straight to speaker.
Note 8 is packed with a bunch of features that I took for granted; such as, wireless charging, s-pen, expandable storage, and even shared WiFi hotspot.
Anyway, for the price point, I'm not complaining. Enjoying using the phone, will plan to root and customize the hell out of this thing. May end up using this as a backup phone later in the future.