Essential PH-1 Review

In 2017, Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android set up his company, Essential Products. Essential Phone was launched soon after and as name suggests, this phone focuses mainly on essentials of a smartphone. This Android-powered smartphone is aimed to go after major flagships in market in 2017. It has a high-end price tag with top of the line specs and features, such as an edge-to-edge display, which goes all the way to top of phone and wraps around front-facing selfie camera, creating the first ever notch on a smartphone. Many people today might believe that Apple iPhone X was first phone to have a notch, but it was actually Essential Phone who started this trend. Being a smartphone launched by one of Android's father, does this phone have quality to make its way to top of smartphone hierarchy? Let's find out.

First thing you will notice looking at Essential Phone is its amazing display. Thanks to its edge-to-edge display that surrounds the front-facing camera and extends virtually all the way to bottom, front of this phone comes closest to an all screen design than any other phone in market right now. Bottom bezel is not there to house a home button/fingerprint sensor, though, but just for a support in holding phone as it is where your fingers will naturally lie.

Essential opted for a titanium frame instead of aluminum, which it claims offers much higher durability compared to often used aluminum we see in many smartphones. This means that Essential Phone should not break or bend under circumstances where most phones get heavily damaged.

At back, Essential covered this phone all up in reflective, mirror-like glossy ceramic, which looks fantastic and feels cool to touch. It gives an illusion of Gorilla Glass due to its reflective nature, as well as it is a huge finger print magnet, so you might want to have a case on it. On top left on back of this phone, you will find a dual-camera setup with laser autofocus and LED flash to its side. Going towards right, there's a noise cancelling mic and on far right is where you will see something you usually don't see on smartphones, pins for modular accessory support. Surprisingly, Essential thought it was essential to add modular support to this phone. Finger print scanner is placed in middle, just below camera and rest of phone is kept clean. There's a gold trim around finger print scanner, making it look eye catching. Surprisingly, you won't find any branding on this phone. One thing worth mentioning about design of Essential Phone is that it doesn't protrudes from anywhere. It's as flat at back as it from front and this makes this phone and extraordinary achievement in design.

Around edges, Essential has cleverly implemented a grippy material that doubles as its antenna passthrough. Power button and volume keys are found on side of phone with a USB Type-C port at bottom, next to bottom firing speaker. To my utter disappointment, Essential did not find a 3.5 mm headphone jack essential and that's missing on this device. Tactile buttons, however, are simple to find and have a nice click to them.

Overall, it is a great and fresh design. Build quality is excellent and ceramic does provide a luxury feel together with extra sturdiness. There are some downers such as lack of headphone jack and no waterproofing, but Essential has hit crucial elements of design right on the spot.

Display is where Essential phone shines out and makes itself unique from every other smartphone in market. Phone houses a 5.7 inch Quad HD LTPS IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1312x2560p, aspect ratio of 18:9 and pixel density of 504 ppi.

Eye-catching feature of this display is its eye like notch on top which wraps around front facing camera, giving this phone maximum display area available. It is a bright display with sharp colors and vivid saturation points. It is LCD instead of OLED, however, which means Essential Phone won't really work well with VR headsets. Screen performs well on benchmark tests, covering an impressive 159 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is better than LG G6 but behind Samsung Galaxy S8 and OnePlus 5. Hues are rich on this display when you watch videos which adds a sense of pleasure to your eyes.

Screen delivers fairly accurate colors too, as it turned in a Delta-E score of 0.28. That's nearly perfect, as 0 is ideal, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Because this is an LCD panel and not OLED, blacks can look gray, and contrast wasn't as good as on Samsung Galaxy S8's display. Viewing angles and screen legibility outside is quite nice though for an LCD panel and the fact that it is a 5.7 inch-display in a body which is almost as small as an Apple iPhone 7 or Google Pixel just makes entire viewing experience of this phone so modern and elegant. For protection, Essential is using Gorilla Glass 5 which means minor drops and scratches won't damage this beautiful phone.

You will have a difficult time putting Essential Phone down due to its display as its crisp, large, and will make you want to keep using your phone. Safe to say, Essential got the build materials, design, and display right on its first try.

Top tier specs and performance is what keeps good and great smartphones apart, and Essential aims for greatness with their hardware choice for Essential Phone. Phone is powered by Snapdragon 835 processor and Adreno 530 GPU, coupled with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of on-board storage. Phone only comes with a single memory option and doesn't support external storage through Micro SD expansion.

During my performance test, Essential Phone was fully able to stand up to tasks of usual workload. That is, a mix of gaming and multitasking, music listening, e-mail checking and social media apps usage. Despite its small size, I am pleased that Essential Phone puts up performance that we are accustomed to only seeing with bigger phones. Phone performed all tasks without lags or jitters, however, I did notice some buggy behavior at times. For example, some games temporarily got stuck in portrait mode and worst bug was that camera app crashed, and I couldn't use it until I rebooted phone. On Geekbench 4, which measures overall performance, Essential Phone scored 5,960. That's below what Samsung Galaxy S8 turned in (6,295), as well as OnePlus 5 with 8GB of RAM (6,542). Motorolla Moto Z2 Force also notched a higher 6,489 score. On plus side, Essential Phone hit a fairly good 40,748 on Ice Storm Unlimited graphics test, which beats Samsung Galaxy S8 (35,903) and Motorola Moto Z2 Force (39,807).

Most interesting part of Essential Phone's hardware is its modular accessories support. As far as phone module systems go, Essential has landed on a series of technical solutions that I think are fairly elegant. There are two little metal contacts on the back that are there solely to provide power. Data gets transferred wirelessly by converting physical USB connection into wireless data transfer. Modules don't need their own batteries, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi as they can get it all from phone from either connection pins or wireless USB connection. Magnets make it easy to attach and detach them and standard USB approach to wireless data means it should be easy for other companies to make modules. Keeping data wireless means fewer contacts that could damage too. Essential is not first to implement modules support as Motorola and LG (LG G5) have previously released phones with modular support. Compared to Motorola's competing modular system, Essential's setup has one fairly big flaw. You can't just attach a module and stick phone your pocket like you can with Motorola Moto Z. However, there are a few advantages to that as it doesn't constrain future phone designs, for example. A future phone could stick the module bits in another spot without breaking compatibility. The first module that Essential has announced is a 360 degrees camera. It sells for $199, or bundled with phone for $50 extra. What Essential is trying to do here is build an ecosystem of products to engage customers, similar to what Apple has done.

You'll find other features that you expect to see on a flagship phone, such as, Bluetooth 5.0 LE, NFC, LTE, GPS, GLONASS and USB Type-C. There's no 3.5 mm headphone jack to be found but to overcome that loss, Essential has added a quite loud single bottom firing speaker. Speaker is very loud but audio quality is not as good as let's say, Apple iPhone X.

Overall, Essential Phone carries some great combination of hardware for a phone in 2017, and does delivers stellar performance, with some occasional bugs.

Essential Phone comes with a rather small sized 3040 mAh battery which supports fast charging. During normal usage, phone gave a screen-on time of around 8 hours, however, during heavy usage, phone could not reach 6 hours mark. Phone does support quick charging though, so if you are a heavy user, you might want to keep a charger nearby to quickly juice up your device.

Being a phone supporting essentials of a smartphone, Essential did not believe wireless charging to be important, as they could easily implement that using ceramic back which supports wireless charging, just like glass backs.

For most users, battery on this phone will be more than enough to carry them throughout the day. For heavy users, they will have to make some adjustments and try battery saving options.

For any phone to be the best smartphone, there needs to be a great camera on it and Essential's strategy is to include a dual 13 MP camera setup, both having an f/1.9 aperture, augmented with laser autofocus and phase detection. One of these sensors is a RGB lens and other is monochrome. You don't get 2x optical zoom from this camera combination like you do from Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and Apple iPhone 7 Plus, but Essential claims that this setup can capture up to 200 percent more light than traditional phone cameras as well as you can also shoot black-and-white photos.

Initially camera on Essential Phone had quite some problems, as capturing speeds were slow and phone used to take a lot of time saving those photos. With some software updates, few of those issues were solved while rest still remain there. If we're outside in sunny conditions and we're taking photos in ideal light, they turn out to be great. Once we get indoors and lighting gets a tiny bit dimmer, it's far more difficult to snap a decent photo. Low-light photos are not good at all, most are too grainy, with poor detail and muted colors. There is more than one camera on its back, but it would seem that dual cameras on their own don't automatically provide good results in dim lighting. The only good thing about this pair of cameras is that one is monotone, which means we're able to snap native black and white photos, which look pretty decent.

Poor performance was evident with autofocus as well as it struggled to focus in on subjects that were not perfectly still, and shutter was a touch slower than on other phones. Picture quality was about on a par with OnePlus 5, meaning they were acceptable, but not as good as the ones I took with the Google Pixel 2 XL or the Samsung Galaxy S8.

After an update improved camera and introduced a Portrait Mode, results have improved and while I think camera has certainly gotten better, it is still not up to par of other flagship smartphones. Camera grabs and shows off more detail now, but it still under-performs in anything other than broad daylight and it often seems like HDR capabilities are non-existent. Portrait Mode works well in good lighting and does a fairly good job of finding edges of subject and accurately blurring out background. Best part of update, however, is reduced shutter lag. Earlier, tapping shutter icon didn't capture a photo immediately, resulting often in blurry photos. With recent update, camera still is not as fast as most flagship smartphones, but shutter lag has vastly improved.

Essential Phone is capable of recording videos in 4K at 30 fps, 1080p at 60fps and 720p at 120 fps. On front, there's an 8 MP selfie camera with and f/2,2 aperture capable of recording videos up to 4K at 30 fps. It is solid and can takes good selfies, but it's nothing notable. Overall, I have yet to be really impressed by any particular photo, and it still feels like an uninspiring camera.

Modular 360-degree camera on attachment Essential Phone is another story though. While magnetic connection is strong and secure, it takes a while for it to become useable once camera app is launched for the first time. Picture quality may technically reach 4K quality in optimal conditions, but there is serious lag while recording and some ugly pixilation when moving quickly. Also, camera emits a high-pitched noise whenever app is opened. While Essential's 360 camera takes pretty good photos for its size and price, its app needs a lot of work. Camera was occasionally slow to take photos and several times, I saw a black screen when I switched back to camera from photo gallery, or when going from 4K to 2K resolution. I had to relaunch app, or reconnect camera to phone, in order for it to work again. After taking a picture with the Essential camera, you can share it to your social network of choice, add a filter, or make basic adjustments to lighting, color, and what the app calls "Pop" which makes things look more vibrant. If you make edits to a photo, it saves it as a flat file, so you can't view and scroll around it as a 360-photo on phone. There's little in the way of in-camera adjustments. You can switch between 4K and 2K resolution, but that's it. There's no self-timer, no way to adjust white balance, nor HDR mode.

Camera quality is a big deal for me and for a whole lot of other people in our modern media-heavy society. This, more than anything else, is a major reason why this phone is not rated higher than its competitors in market. With great thought given to design and hardware, it seems like Essential forgot to work on camera.

Straight out of the box, Essential phone will come with Android 7.1 Nougat with updates available to Android 8.1 Oreo. Best thing about this phone's software is what you don't see. With exception of a single My Sprint app, you won't find any carrier bloatware here. In fact, this is the closest thing to pure Android 7.1 and almost as clean as one on Google Pixel phone.

Phone is designed as a blank slate, simple, bare, down to the very basics. That truly is, coming with fewer Android apps than I've ever seen on a smartphone before just those required by Google, and a custom camera app. This is the ideal software setup for a hardcore Android enthusiast in the year 2017. While a lot of smartphones now contain their own apps, and sometimes apps of their mobile carrier, I still prefer this. For extreme "it's yours now, download what you want" attitude I get from this phone, I rate it highly and feel that this is very much a phone made for people who know what they're doing with a smartphone.

While most of apps built into this phone make use of extended aspect ratio, almost all apps we tried from the Google Play Store cut off the top slide of screen, making experience fairly traditional looking. Unlike LG G6, LG V30, Samsung Galaxy Note 8, Samsung Galaxy S8 and more, Essential Phone contains no options to zoom into an app to make it scale to its aspect ratio. It's likely this could be fixed in future, but not without risk of chopping out vital information for many apps. This means that, for now, movies and games will look as they do on traditional displays.

Rest of software experience is fairly clean and simple, everything you will find on a stock android phone. It goes along with name of this phone, as it provides users with bare essentials of Android with speedy OS updates. It could be made perfect, only if Essential sorts out bugs and issues.

Essential Phone is available in market for $499, which is a serious price cut from its previous $700 price tag. It is available in 3 standard colors: Black Moon, Halo Gray and Pure White and 3 Limited Edition colors: Ocean Depths, Stellar Gray and Copper Black. Phone has a gorgeous ceramic and titanium design with slim bezel and an edge to edge display with smallest notch you will see on any smartphone right now. Hardware on this phone is great for 2017, it packs power and speed and near to stock Android experience really puts icing on the cake.

However, it comes with a bag full of cons as phone experiences occasional crashes, bugs and freeze. Hardware features that many smartphone users might be expecting, such as 3.5 mm headphone jack and wireless charging are missing on this phone most importantly, camera performance is extremely disappointing. There are many phones, even in $500 price point which deliver exceptional camera performance and if a phone really wants to survive in this cut-throat smartphone market, it really needs to bring its A-game and Essential has not done that here.

Again, it can be a great buy for people who are mostly concerned about a great design and good hardware, as with some updates, there have been some stability in software as well. For people who are looking for an all-rounder, however, they should opt for other phones in market as this phone certainly is not for them.