Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Essential Phone Review: Save Your Money!”.
The essential ph-1 essential, ph one essential for see what you i see, what you did there hey? What is up guys mkbhd here, and this is the essential phone. It’S a new phone from a new company, but with a not so new philosophy of just sticking with the essentials, you know no bells and whistles no fancy, widgets or crazy features or head turning stuff. Just 700 of the pure essentials i’ll be using this phone for a little bit now, and i have a pretty good idea of how well they did and whether you should buy one or not. So that’s what this video is so, first of all, the hardware is awesome and that’s usually really hard for new companies to get right off the bat. So i’m impressed here the essential phone feels great in the hand. It’S this all black, titanium and ceramic slab. No protrusions at all no logos at all, no branding or anything like that.
It’S just an essential rectangle with rounded corners the titanium sides that material is actually a lot harder than your typical aluminum. So that means you should hold up to chipping or any drops much better and the back which you could easily mistake for gorilla glass is not glass at all. It is polished ceramic, so that makes it much harder than glass making it way less likely to scratch.
It all, but also theoretically, making it more likely to break since ceramic is more brittle than gorilla glass. Basically, what i’m saying is this would be a really interesting phone to drop test, but no, i won’t i’ll leave that to other channels, but what you will notice right out. The box, though, is the ceramic, makes the phone a bit heavier, just more dense feeling in the hand, and it’s also a serious fingerprint magnet. It’S like a mirror finish, which is super nice when it’s clean, but it will never be clean, so definitely worth getting a dbrand skin on the back of this one and it can actually make the phone look a lot better than without the skin. If you ask me, this is one of those rare instances so i’ll link to this matte black one right below that like button, but long story short, i like the industrial design here. It’S simple, not too flashy but obviously still has a signature. Look only thing: you’re missing here is waterproofing.
A lot of other phones in this price range have some ip certification, not this one. Maybe next year the fingerprint reader on this guy is actually pretty quick to recognize your finger, but it always feels like there’s a tiny delay when i actually turn the screen on and unlock the phone. If you can see that it’s not bad, but you can definitely address that with a software update and the rest of the back of the phone is the mic and two pins for attaching small modular accessories and providing power through them. So the one that exists right now is the world’s smallest 360 degree camera it just snaps right into place with magnets in the phone which is really convenient. So hopefully there are more mods added to their ecosystem. Sooner than later, i don’t have any of them right now, but we’ll have to wait and see how good that gets the speaker for those who care is it’s actually really loud? It gets very, very loud, but it’s not like the best quality loud. So there’s no big dynamic range, there’s no bass or anything like that. It’S just really loud, and it’s also this small, pretty blockable grille at the bottom of the phone and there’s also no headphone jack anywhere on the essential phone.
So audio is clearly not a priority. With this guy so yeah, i guess the easiest joke to make about the essential phone is. They didn’t include a headphone jack, which is essential to most people seems kind of weird. Yes, i do think they could have included one, but they didn’t welcome to 2017. I guess anyway, around the front is the 5.7 inch display with a sort of the signature? Look at this point, the cutout in the top of the middle for the front-facing camera and the absolutely tiny bezels on the top and the sides. Originally, i thought i wouldn’t like this or it might get distracting or annoying, but i can tell you right now that disappears just a couple hours into using it, and the phone looks awesome in my opinion, with the thin bezels. We just talked about this in the most recent video, yes, technically, moving the display way up closer to the corners would seem to make it easier to damage it with a drop, but the ceramic and titanium should also work against that and all the times that the Phone isn’t using the full display. It just blocks out that bar to match the bottom bezel, so it looks like a completely normal phone most of the time.
Anyway. It’S also a quad hd display and it gets up to 500 nits so decently bright, but not the brightest like i can see outdoors, but i’ve seen better. In fact, the only real downside i can see with this screen is that it’s not an oled. If it were an oled, you could do some cool tricks with totally blacking out the top and the bottom or you could do some cool wallpaper tricks where it fades to complete blackness up at the top, and you could do some cool essential tricks where you, like. Only light up a display for notifications instead of the whole thing little things like that, but it’s not it’s an lcd which you know that’s just fine for now, maybe next year, but where this phone really lives up to the name, the essential is in the software. It is so clean. This phone is rocking basically stock, android 7.1.1 and i imagine it’ll be getting android 8.0 oreo through a software update pretty soon it’s already gotten two software updates.
Since i got the thing and so once you get past the essential boot screen, you get, you know: stock, google launcher stock, android notification shade just a couple: google apps installed absolutely zero bloatware out the box. The only third party app installed on this phone when you get it is the camera app which we’ll get to in a second. So this is delivering essentially the exact same software experience as a pixel.
No extra features are buried in the settings, no waving gestures or iris scanning no extra assistance or any of that. The essential part in the settings is just to tick whether or not you want to send diagnostic data to the company or not it’s just just android. It’S clean the pure base essentials, and so of course, because of that performance is great, i mean it’s also because of the specs too.
You know snapdragon 835, 4 gigs of ram. You don’t need the craziest specs to run pure android smoothly, but this phone balls out gaming is fine. Multitasking is fine.
Hiccups aren’t at zero, but they’re minimal and lag doesn’t happen much at all, except in the camera. In fact, you know what, let’s? Let’S talk about? The camera – this is the weakest part of the device straight up, so if you were looking for a reason not to buy this phone, if you want to tell someone why not to buy it, link them to this part of the video, the essential phone actually has. Two cameras on the back: a 13 megapixel color camera and a 13 megapixel monochrome camera and they’re used together to enhance the detail and contrast and sharpness in everyday regular photos. Unfortunately, most people will never actually notice this, so the only other benefit just ends up being.
It can also take black and white photos in the camera app and the camera. App is the only app that i’ve ever really seen lag hard on this phone and it’s been pretty consistently slow. It lags to take photos, it lags when turning hdr on and off, and it lags big time when switching between modes, if you have a lot of stuff going on, so that’s really disappointing and it’s not even like it’s a super complex camera app. In fact, it’s one of the simplest camera apps possible every option available to change is shown on the screen right now, so there’s no other hidden settings, there’s no manual mode, no pro mode. This is it and then the photos themselves are pretty mediocre. At best again, you would think a phone at this price that adds a second sensor. Just to add, detail and dynamic range would be great with the sharpness and photos. Something seems like it really focuses on photography, but the photos from this phone are still soft.
They’Re lacking dynamic range, they’re, noisy in anything but perfect lighting and often have the totally wrong exposure altogether. Turning hdr on also didn’t help as much as i thought it would. You’Ve seen hdr from other phones like the s8 and the pixel they’re great, but this one barely adds a little bit back to the highlights and that’s it so the lacking camera and camera app here are pretty disappointing. Even the videos off it are really shaky and also disappointing. The one thing about photos – and videos, though, is they can be improved via software updates. In fact, that’s usually the number one thing that gets the most improved over time with smartphones software updates, but i’ve still never seen one go from not good to really good with just software updates, so i feel pretty safe, saying you’re not going to want to buy This phone for the camera, what you should buy this phone for are the great stock software experience, that’s pretty obvious, it’s clean and pretty unique. You could buy it for the premium, build quality, the ceramic and titanium. As far as i can see, aren’t combined like this. In any other smartphone, you might even get it for the battery life.
This thing gets great battery life. It’S been really impressive for a 3040 milliamp hour battery and a 5.7 inch display, but i keep getting four to four and a half hours of screen on time. So it lasts comfortably all day, you might even get it for just the little things you like about it.
The display the tiny notification led right above the screen which gets really bright or bluetooth 5.0, or even the awesome accessories included in the box, which are also first of all, totally non-branded no logo anywhere, but also really high quality and really cool to see a smartphone Bundle braided high quality cables in the box that feel like they’re, going to last a long time and a super high powered 27 watt charger. That goes extremely fast, so the bottom line is, would i would i recommend, buying this phone and as much as i enjoyed using it? Probably not don’t get me wrong. It’S awesome to see a new company get so much right in their first try, but at the same time it is 700 bucks. So it’s kind of for me, like it’s floating around in that void of other, really good smartphones from the established manufacturers for the same price.
You could get a galaxy s8. That also has a software skin, but also has a way better camera and also has waterproofing and a headphone jack or for the same price. You could also get a google pixel from last year, which may have bigger bezels, but it has better speakers and it gets the exact same software updates but way faster. We can just wait for the new pixel to come out this year.
That’Ll have smaller bezels and the new software, so essential phone to me is a great episode, one, it’s a great start and i’m excited for episode two when essential phone two comes out, hopefully has one or two more distinguishing features at that price range that aren’t proprietary Mods and then i’ll be really into it and i’ll probably be more likely to recommend it, but until then this is still really cool to see. Save your money thanks for watching talk to you guys, the next one peace .