When I met Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, earlier this year to talk about his new company, he showed me a PowerPoint deck from 2009. His team put it together just before the debut of the Motorola Droid, Android's first real chance to take on the iPhone. The campaign slogan was "Droid Does," and Motorola planned to harp on all the things the iPhone couldn't do. It crowed about multitasking, "real keyboards," and interchangeable batteries. And it worked: The Droid was a smash hit, in large part because it was everything the iPhone wasn't.
With his new company, Essential, and his new phone, the Essential Phone (the PH-1, but we're not calling it that), Rubin's playing the same game. But the iPhone has changed. The way Rubin sees it, people don't like that it's a walled garden with little room to customize or experiment. Or that it's everywhere, the same phone your grandma and your accountant carry. Or that it is, well, boring.
The Essential Phone ships September 1, starting at $699. You can buy it subsidized from Sprint, or unlocked from Amazon and elsewhere. (You should buy it unlocked.) It is the first in a line of products that Essential believes will bring innovation back to the smartphone market and give people a brand to love in the same way millions love Apple.
In some ways, the Essential Phone appears genuinely exciting and new. In most, it just feels like a really good smartphone. And in a few frustrating ways, it's not yet good enough.
You learn a lot about the Essential Phone merely by picking it up. This sharp-edged, slippery slab of titanium and ceramic conveys power, all tool and no toy. It has no camera bumps, no branding. The black one (it also comes in white) feels like a prop in a Tom Cruise movie in which he stops mid-call, flings his phone at approaching enemies, incapacitates them all, then pulls his phone from the pile of bodies and resumes the conversation. Maybe with a quip like "Thanks for holding," dramatic pause, "my phone was busy."
All of which is to say I love how this phone feels. I wish it were a little lighter in my pocket, and not quite so slippery or prone to fingerprints. It's also not as tough as it looks. Yes, that titanium body won't ding or scratch the way aluminum or plastic do. But the Essential Phone isn't waterproof, which I consider an absolutely necessary feature on a great phone these days, nor is it impervious to destruction like the Moto Z's Shattershield screen. In a show of confidence of the phone's strength, the company doesn't offer a case. Still, it won't quantify the phone's ruggedness, because if you drop it, you might just break it.
The screen, though, is everything a phone screen should be. The 5.71-inch, 2560x1312 display renders everything crisply and clearly, and with barely any bezel beyond the bit at the bottom, the phone feels much smaller than, say, an iPhone 7 Plus. Full-screen movies and games look fantastic, even if the odd aspect ratio means your 16:9 video won't quite fill the screen. And that tiny notch at the top, around the camera? I couldn't stop looking at it for about an hour, then promptly stopped noticing. I like it more than what I've seen in renderings of the next iPhone, and I'd rather have it than the wonky camera placement in something like the Xiaomi Mi Mix. Until manufacturers figure out how to remove the camera notch altogether, this feels like the best answer.
The only downside of this gloriously full screen lies in the software. More often than not, Android slaps a black border at the top of the phone above whatever app you're using, which kind of kills the effect. In a few places, content can flow all the way up, giving you more maps or an even wider-angle Netflix, but you'd often never know you didn't have a bezel. As more phones get smaller bezels, this will change, but the full effect of the full screen hasn't quite arrived.
Part of Essential's brand holds that people want a phone that feels like their phone, that doesn't scream brand allegiances or look like every other phone. I want to sneer at the high-mindedness of it all, but I get it. I like having a phone with no logos, no fine print, no camera bumps. Especially when otherwise, it's about as powerful as you'd want. There's just one model, with a Snapdragon 835 processor (great), 4 gigs of RAM (meh), 128 gigs of storage (great), a 3040mAh battery (pretty good), and no headphone jack (all the feels, especially since there are no headphones in the box). The battery lasts all day, and even occasionally through the night. The included USB-C charger, which features a nice braided cable, works its magic quickly.
Here's where I land on the hardware: I really like it. It doesn't look wildly futuristic like the Samsung Galaxy S8, which boasts an even better display, waterproofing, and a super-slim body. But the Essential is less fragile, it doesn't have a million logos or a hard drive full of bloatware, and you can actually use the fingerprint reader. As a pure object, I much prefer it to the S8 or Google's Pixel. I haven't liked the feel of a phone this much since the glory days of the iPhone 5. But unfortunately, it's not all such good news.