Essential Phone Review: Maximum Hardware, Minimum Software

Your anal­o­gy of vanil­la ice cream is real­ly off. Vanil­la is usu­al­ly front and cen­ter with oth­er fla­vors around it in the store, because you can do any­thing to it. Hence, mak­ing Vanil­la ice cream very versatile.

If it had a pix­el-grade cam­era and amoled, i would buy it.

Rich Chig­ga is def­i­nite­ly essential.

I’m 15, and have an iPhone 6, I orig­i­nal­ly had a moto x force, but it unex­pect­ed­ly stopped work­ing a year after I got it. I real­ly want an android phone again and pre­fer stock android to iOS, and I am famil­iar with stock too because it’s the only android I’ve ever used. Cam­era qual­i­ty isn’t a major impor­tance to me, as long as it’s bet­ter then the iPhone 6+. And is decent. Is the essen­tial phone a good option because that screen is sick.

One of my favorite YT reviewers.

You guys REALLY need to keep in mind the tar­get AUDIENCE for this phone. This phone was NOT made to tar­get the aver­age con­sumer who buys iphone or sam­sung phones, or looks for as many fea­tures as pos­si­ble but does­n’t mind spend­ing a bit more mon­ey. This phone was aimed at cost con­scious android enthu­si­asts. This phone real­ly would­n’t have made as much of a splash 2 or 3 years ago when nexus’ were pret­ty solid­ly built and quite cheap. Nowa­days, pret­ty much the ONLY android phone that gets fast updates is pix­el, and now essen­tial. This has 128GB stor­age for under $800, that’s INSANE. For­get EVERYTHING ELSE, that by ITSELF is a MASSIVE pro for this phone. I don’t know many oth­er phones that have 128GB of stor­age for that low a price. 

“soft­ware updates don’t mat­ter” you say? Well, tell me that the next ttime you hear about a sam­sung or LG phone being hacked due to a month old HEAVILY pub­li­cized and upstream fixed attack vector/hack (c.f. ‘blue­borne’). For the last 3 ‑4 years EVERY year i hear about one of these “new hacks”, this year it’s blue­borne, a few years ago it was some heart­bleed and so on. Cur­rent­ly the only phones that are immunne to blue­borne are iPhone, Pixel/Nexus (with lat­est update) and the Essen­tial Phone. They HAD to keep the fea­tures art a min­i­mum, do you know WHY sam­sung takes SO LONG to update their phones even though htey like­ly get their hands on upstream code before any­one else? because they have to update all THEIR “baked in good­ies” to fit into the new ver­sion of the soft­ware, that takes IMMENSE time and effort, the big­ger the update the more the time this takes. 

This phone is for some­one who wants a sim­ple phone with quick updates and does­n’t care about too much else. If you are NOT one of these peo­ple DON’T com­plain about this phone, that’s like com­plain­ing that the tes­la car is too expen­sive and fancy…OF COURSE it is, that’s the POINT of the tes­la car.

Joshua has a great nar­rat­ing voice! Awe­some review!!

Re: CAMERA!!! Guys (and girls) make sure you do COMPLETE home­work before mak­ing a deci­sion. Every­one has an opin­ion. Mine? i’m cur­rent­ly run­ning ZSL app on my nexus 6p, con­sid­er­ing this phone. Let me tell you, my cam­era went from so, so to AMAZING with a sys­tem mod­i­fi­ca­tion on my root­ed phone. So, i’m not so sure of the whole “soft­ware does­n’t real­ly make much dif­fer­ence,” when it comes to the cam­era. Just shar­ing for infor­ma­tion’s sake. Not try­ing to be crit­i­cal. i appre­ci­ate the time tak­en to give a review.

What game was he playing?

Nice review, great word play. 😉

Is it worth it at $500?

I like how many haters my amaz­ing ceram­ic steel front fac­ing 4k 128GB onboard hav­ing phone has.

Charg­ing time¿¿¿

Great phone for a good price. Please review after the 8.1 update. It’s far bet­ter than before.

Okay, so vanil­la is always in the front of my cool­er lol

umm i’m sure essen­tial has blue­tooth, so no need head­phone wires, cut the cord. Also, theres a attach­ment like the 360 cam­era for headphones.

Tita­ni­um side and ceram­ic back, 4gb 128gb real­ly get my atten­tion, must feel very pre­mi­um. Sad that essen­tial phone could not succeed.