Three Standout Features of Essential Phone
Essential Phone is, in short, a premium Android smartphone priced at $700 which consequently has all the characteristics of a premium Android smartphone for 2017: large screen with almost no bezels, pretty good camera, and lots of processing power. So far nothing particularly surprising. More importantly, nothing that most people can’t find in some other phone with a name they already know, from a company they already know — unlike Essential. However there’s a bit more to it. Essential Phone comes from Andy Rubin who played a major role in the rise of Android, which today happens to be the world’s leading operating system. Essential is Andy’s latest endeavour, and his first products are a phone called Phone and a home assistant device called Home. Announcement of Phone itself made a splash a few months back, as did the recent news that some major players, mighty Amazon included, are backing Essential. Home is a bit mysterious and not here yet, but Phone has been made available to general public.
Reviews will tell you everything you need to know about what Essential Phone brings today, but I’d like to highlight three Essential features relevant for tomorrow:
First one is that there’s no bloatware; i.e. only essential apps come pre-installed.
Essential Phone comes with stock Android, without redundant apps pre-installed as is often the case even for top shelf Android phones. Having multiple apps for the same purpose obviously does not make for a fantastic user experience. Users should not have to pick which app to use to look at pictures, which one of the messaging apps to use, and so on. But they do on most of the Android phones sold nowadays. While this is not a great user experience, manufacturers include it because it gives them hope that customers will be locked-in, while people tolerate it because it’s something they know how to live with. Essential wants to make not having bloatware installed a selling feature of this phone.
Google famously has two or more apps for exactly the same purpose. Not only apps and not only limited to Android, they are even pushing two large operating systems (Android and Chrome) and in the background cooking a whole new one (Fuchsia). What I’m aiming at is, if having only the essential apps installed out of the box is something that makes or breaks a smartphone, someone would have figured it out by now and industry would have followed suit. There were attempts to provide a clean Android experience, and everyone agrees how it beats having pre-installed bloatware, but phones with bloatware end up shipping many, many more units. This Essential feature looks awesome for people well familiar with Android such as audience on XDA Developers or r/Android, but for most — people who don’t know what either XDA Developers or r/Android are — it’s not a huge factor. Color options end up being far more important at the end of the day.
But it’s a good things for Essential Phone that no bloatware isn’t a standout feature. If it were, next year all phones would have no extra apps, and whole of their competitive advantage would be gone in an instant. Which brings us to second potential standout feature.
Essential Phone is modular.
Essential Phone can be “extended” by using clever snap-on accessories. While the mechanism itself is a probably the best implementation of modularity on smartphones, last year has demonstrated that there are more fundamental reasons why modularity has not caught on, other than ease of attaching accessories.
There’s no compelling evidence that people would like to pay $700 for a phone, then to pay a few hundred more for an accessory, and finally not to have it with them when the right moment finally comes. Smartphones are supposed to remove friction out of our lives, while making the decision to buy hardware extras and carrying them around is adding friction.
If modularity somehow ends up being a significant addition, it would take competition more than 6–12 months to catch up, which is pretty nice head start to have. But once competitors get into the game, they’d most likely have huge install base advantage over Essential.
Chances are that modularity will not be something more than a curiosity for reviews, but there’s the third standout feature of Essential Phone.
Premium materials.
Regular flagship phones are mostly made from a combination of aluminum, stainless steel and glass. Essential Phone is made out of titanium and ceramic. What’s wonderful about it is how Essential can take something that would normally be a weakness, i.e. in this case not selling hundreds of millions of phones as some competitors do, and turn it into an advantage.
See, companies that sell hundreds of millions of devices can’t easily use brand new technologies because they sell hundreds of millions. Late in 2016 there were rumours how Apple would make the next iPhone ceramic, but as some pointed out the scale on which they’re operating makes it next to impossible to make a complete switch from one generation of phones to another. There simply isn’t enough machinery in the world that would allow Apple to make the next iPhone from brand new materials, assuming they would like to keep making and selling hundreds of millions yearly.
Apple is in a bit of a tough spot even to make AMOLED screens on the next iPhone as the world’s output of such panels isn’t enough to make every new iPhone have it. What Apple will do to counter it is to segment the product line into “premium” and “regular” models, with former using new materials but also carrying a significantly higher price tag. A while ago they have started conditioning people to expect this through leaks of a next iPhone being priced over $1000.
I have little doubt in Apple’s ability to sell phones even if priced well over $1000. What will be more interesting is to see how they’ll frame having a new “regular” model, iPhone 7s or whatever it’s called, priced as any flagship today while simultaneously introducing an even more expensive model, let’s call it iPhone 8. Not all people who’ll want to buy iPhone 8 will be able to get one, and it remains to be seen how many are willing to settle for iPhone 7s.
Which brings us to Essential Phone which has an unique advantage of:
a) Being produced on a scale which makes it possible to use new premium materials;
b) Not having a negative impact on existing or upcoming models;
c) Backing of Amazon and a few other big names.
The last one is not as interesting for gadget lovers but is quite important if this phone were to find an audience. Google has been struggling with that for a long time, and everyone knows who Google is. Huge majority of people have not heard of Essential nor Andy Rubin.
Essential Phone and its Edge
It took Samsung years to make curved screen edge a standard offering. Such display first came on Galaxy Note Edge, and only one side of screen. Then there were separate “S” and “S Edge” models for a while, and only starting from 2017 every flagship Galaxy S8 comes with it by default. Samsung iterated, improved and persisted for years not because curved screen edge is particularly useful, but because it’s a standout feature that others cannot copy within a few months time.
Out of these three standout features on Essential Phone, using some premium materials or technology that cannot be made on a huge scale is most likely the best offense against the heavyweights, as it’s the one that’s the most difficult to copy.
