Essential’s Toronto launch party was your standard tech industry launch gathering – with one key exception: Lining one wall was a series of three booths, demonstrating the Essential Phone’s camera tech, design process and hardware engineering respectively, and each was staffed by people who actually did the work.
That’s exceptional because you almost never get the chance to talk directly with the engineers actually doing frontline work on consumer devices, even as media with access. Typically, the people you get to talk to have a deep familiarity with the products they’re showing off, but they’re trained specifically to interact with the public and press, and are seldom deeply involved with the engineering or design process.
That’s partly because Essential[1] has under 100 employees in total, which is tiny for a company building and shipping premium smartphones (Apple has over 100,000 global full-time employees, by comparison). But it’s also because part of what Essential wants to do is change the way people feel about smartphones, and shake up some of the sense of atrophy that has descended on this highly commoditized market.
The recurring question around Essential from seemingly everyone paying attention, myself included, is what makes the company and its products so different? Founder Andy Rubin is a legend in the mobile world, since he helped create Android and built some of the first must-have mobile devices at Danger. But bona fides aside, it’s hard to point to any one thing that Essential offers that isn’t already addressed by existing premium devices.
That differentiator might not be any single hardware feature or easily identifiable device difference. Don’t get me wrong: there’s little question in my mind that the industrial design of the Essential Phone itself is top notch[2],...