The Essential Phone Pros and Cons: What We Love and What We Don’t

With a dream of creating something new, Andy Rubin, the father of Android set out to create a new phone. Dubbed as the Essential phone, this one is built with the hopes of taking on the iPhone. Packing a top-of-the line specs and an incredible edge-to-edge display, the Essential Phone is priced at $699.

Howsoever, impressive are the features and specs, it’s not without its share of faults.

Here, in this post, we explore the pros and cons of the Essential Phone.

Disclaimer

The Essential Phone Pros

1. Strong Build Quality

With the Essential Phone blending a unique set of materials, it’s hard to debate on the build quality — be it the scratch resistant ceramic back panel, the Gorilla Glass 5 on the front or the titanium rail on the edge.

These materials are not only strong but durable as well. For instance, ceramic is stronger than glass, thus resisting scratches in the process, while the Titanium on the rails is durable than the Aluminium that we see on most of the phones.

2. Future Ready

The Essential Phone is one of the best examples of a future-ready phone, thanks to its modular design approach. Of course, it’s not the first one to do so (remember, Motorola?), but it has done so in a fairly cool manner.

For now, it comes with a detachable 360-degree modular camera which can be used whenever you need it. The main advantage of this design is that these modules shall work on other devices as well.

Other than that, Essential has assured of two software update iteration and security updates for another year.

3. Fast Charging

The 3040mAh battery of the Essential Phone can be topped up pretty quickly, thanks to Fast Charge. In a time when most of the Android phone has various methods for charging on-the-go, this feature is more than welcome.

Given the huge screen real estate, the Fast Charge technique would be more than useful.

4. The Dual Camera Advantage

Similar to the latest flagships, the Essential Phone packs in dual camera setup consisting of two 13-megapixel cameras at the rear. One of the world’s thinnest Dual camera setup, it boasts of two sensors — color and monochrome, much like the Nokia 8 or the Huawei Honor P9.

The Essential phone dual camera is the world’s thinnest setup.

The advantages of having a monochrome sensor are many. For one, it helps in regulating the amount of light that comes to the focus point, thereby yielding sharper pictures as the end result.

The Essential Phone Cons

1. Not Waterproof

Though the Essential Phone is built using the best materials in town, strangely it isn’t water proof. Given that almost all the latest arrivals like the Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+, Galaxy Note8, LG G6 or the HTC U11 are waterproof.

2. No Scope to Increase Memory

The Essential Phone comes bundled with only storage option — the 128 GB of internal storage and there’s no way of increasing or expanding it.

The storage option depends completely on how you use your phone. If you backup your files and pictures to cloud or choose to listen to online streaming of songs, the limited storage option might not seem a big issue. But if you don’t, then it might pose as an issue later on.

3. Heavy

At 185 grams, the Essential phone will prove to be quite a heavy phone. Though it’s a tad similar to the weight profile of the iPhone 7 Plus, that too with a bigger screen ratio, the initial switch over can prove to be quite taxing.

4. No Head Phone Jack

When Apple confirmed the absence of headphone jacks in the iPhone 7, marketing chief Phil Schiller had said, “The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us”. Well, courage seems to be doing a fresh round in the smartphone world with the Essential Phone dumping the 3.5mm headphone jack as well.

Calling it a Wrap

In a nutshell, we can safely say that the Essential Phone is the result of trying new things. But then, as they say, nothing in this (smartphone) world is perfect and the Essential Phone also lacks a few features which would have pushed it higher up the ladder.

So, would you buy it? Do drop us a line or two in the comments below.

See Next: The Incredible 360-Degree Camera of the Essential Phone