Android co-founder Andy Rubin has a new venture called Essential. The aim of this company is to make a world-class phone – one that combines minimalist style with exceptionally high-performance, but most importantly, one that serves to streamline people’s lives, not to clutter or colonise them. Meet the Essential Phone. A stylish high-end smartphone that rivals the major flagships. It features a bezel-less screen; bold design; and modular features. But how will it fare performance-wise compared to other high-end competitors? And – as a debut flagship – how much will it set you back?
Here’s everything you need to know about Andy Rubin’s brainchild the Essential Phone, including price, release date, design, features and specs.
Essential Phone UK release date
The Essential Phone will be shopping this week in the US, with mobile retailer Sprint opening pre-orders for the handset on 17 August. Amazon has also put the phone up for pre-order, with a planned shipping date of 1 September.
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The Essential Phone’s UK launch will come alongside launches in Western Europe and Japan, although specific dates have not yet been confirmed. Watch this space.
Essential Phone price
As a flagship handset, the Essential Phone comes in at a lofty price point of $699 (£540 before VAT). The Essential Phone is only available in one model – the unlocked 128GB handset. Downsizing just isn’t an option.
However, given the current valuation of the pound, we’d be surprised if it launched for anything less than £599 in the UK.
There’s the small offer of a consolation prize for US buyers, however; there’s a limited time bundle that offers the 360-degree Essential Phone camera for an extra $50 (£40) – a decent saving (if you were thinking of purchasing anyway) from the normal $199 (£155) price tag.
Essential Phone design
The Essential Phone is comprised of a ceramic and titanium body, with a sought-after edge-to-edge screen. In fact, the Essential Phone is almost entirely devoid of bezel, with the exception of a tiny sliver at the bottom of the handset and a cut-away for the front-facing camera.
Despite bezel-less screens being more prone to cracks, it’s likely to be a durable phone given its titanium build, which is more resilient than aluminium. Be wary though, as there’s no mention of waterproof design yet, so users will want to tote their Essential Phones with care.
The colour options currently available are opulent-sounding ‘Black Moon’ and ‘Pure White’, with equally intriguing ‘Stellar Grey’ and ‘Ocean Depths’ launching soon. Meanwhile, the face of the phone comprises a wholly black, logo-less screen, punctuated solely by a front-facing camera and a fingerprint scanner. As the name would suggest, the design is clean, pared down, and has done away with non-essentials (well, if the shoe fits…)
Essential Phone features
As mentioned above, the Essential Phone will feature a fingerprint scanner on its screen – something the iPhone 8 is also rumoured to have. That’s not its only high-quality feature: the Essential Phone is said to house the thinnest dual-camera system built for a phone.
Impressively, the dual-rear lenses are said to combine to capture 20 times more light than regular phone cameras, meaning low-light photography on the Essential Phone will be to an excellent standard.
Another feature, or lack thereof, is the absence of the 3.5mm headphone jack, à la the iPhone 7. What it lacks here, it makes up for with extra pieces of hardware that increase the functionality of the phone. The aforementioned 360-degree Essential Phone camera is an example of such hardware, along with a charging dock that’s been announced. Both of these extras will attach to the phone via a magnetic connector on the phone’s rear.
A new AI assistant has also been confirmed for the Essential Phone, as features on its domestic counterpart, the Essential Home. Details of its functionality have not yet been disclosed.
Essential Phone specs
Given the relatively large screen, the handset is surprisingly compact overall, coming in at 141.5 x 71.1 x 7.8mm and weighing 185g. The Essential Phone has a 3,040mAh battery, which – although not fantastic – does come in at slightly more than the Samsung Galaxy S8’s 3,000mAh one.
In terms of power, the Essential Phone runs on a Snapdragon 835 chipset, an octa-core chip with four cores at 2.45GHz and four cores at 1.9GHz. The phone also has 4GB of RAM, making it a valiant contender with any recent flagship releases. There’s a hefty 128GB of storage, but there doesn’t appear to be a microSD slot, disappointingly.
Given that the Essential Phone is a high-quality smartphone, the camera quality is duly commendable; the Essential Phone sports dual 13-megapixel rear cameras, and an 8-megapixel front-facing one. Both the rear and front cameras wield the capacity to shoot 4K video.
Oh, and as the brainchild of Android co-founder Andy Rubin, it rather inevitably runs Android. Predictions are that the operating system will be streamlined (again, "Essential" Phone – it’s sort of in the name), with Tech Radar speculating that it’ll be close to stock Android.