Essential is that rarest of rare breeds in tech: A startup focused on building not just hardware, but a category of hardware that is dominated by two of the most comfortably secure leading companies in any industry.
Still, Essential saw something missing in the now very mature smartphone market, and led by Android creator Andy Rubin, set out to address that gap.The Essential Phone[1] (PH-1 by technical model name) is the fruit of that labor, created by what seems like an impossibly small team, that number under 100 and for much of the device’s development, actually numbered far fewer. It’s an Android smartphone, and it’s most remarkable feature is probably it’s nearly full-face display, which leaves only a thin rectangle of black bezel at the bottom, along with a cutout for the front-facing camera at the top.
But after having used the Essential Phone for a few weeks, the standout feature isn’t the display (or the modular magnetic attachment on the back of the device, which supports the Essential 360 camera[2] and other future accessories). Instead, it’s something far less tangible: The ability of the phone to elicit an emotional reaction – something that very few smartphones today can achieve, and certainly not to the same extent.
The stated goal of Essential is to create a “lovemark” for Android smartphones[3], something that hasn’t really happened yet in the North American market. That’s according to Essential President Niccolo de Masi, who told me that Essential hopes to achieve the kind of relationship with its customers that Apple has managed to secure with its iPhone fans.
Based on my experience, this is exactly what Essential has managed to do. Using their first smartphone felt a...