- When you look at a phone like this,
with a giant screen and these little tiny bezels,
you may think that it's some kind of a dummy,
or an engineering prototype,
or a thought about what phones could be in the future.
But this is a real phone right now.
It's called the Essential Phone.
It's made by a company called Essential.
Now, you probably haven't heard of them before,
but there's one reason you should care:
it's lead by Andy Rubin.
Yes, that Andy Rubin that's one of the creators of Android,
and he's taking on the high-end phone market
with this $699 Essential Phone.
Let's go take a look at this brand new device.
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So, as you'd expect with a name like Essential Phone,
this is all about giving you
the essentials of a high-end device
with no extra features, or styling, or design cues
that are just there to stand out,
but not necessarily enhance your experience of the phone.
And you can tell that right away when you pick it up,
because this is all about the ceramic back
and a full titanium frame,
which immediately differentiated itself from
the aluminium frame and the glass back
that you find on most other phones.
But you see the design is extremely simple.
When you think of, like, a monolithic
or a stealthy device,
especially in a black colour like this,
this is what you get.
It has absolutely no extra ports that it doesn't need,
no extra buttons, no curves.
It's perfectly flat on all sides,
except for the necessary roundness
to move around to the front.
And that's where the main attraction is.
It's this huge, 5.7 inch Quad HD display
that absolutely goes from edge to edge.
Now, when you look at a screen like this,
you think that it's like a dummy display,
or this isn't a real phone,
but this is the real deal.
And you can see just how small it is,
because they have to put the front facing camera
in this little dip at the top of the display.
When you compare it to something like
the LG G6, which is known for having pretty small bezels,
the LG G6 just, it looks gigantic.
It's extremely different.
Even the Galaxy S8, which of course
has to curve its display to try to get
the bezels that small.
It doesn't quite hold up against something
like the Essential Phone.
And the interesting thing about this whole display is that
it doesn't get in the way of you using your phone
like a regular phone.
You can swipe down from the top,
and it just comes down and wraps around
that little front facing camera.
You open up something like Chrome,
and yes, it gives you a little bit taller
status bar at the top,
but it doesn't get in your way.
But aside from that, there are no real changes
to the software here.
It's actually quite surprising how close to very stock
this phone is.
It's Android 7.1, of course,
but the only thing that's actually been tweaked
is the camera software.
Everything else is exactly how it would be
on any perfectly stock Android phone,
from the settings, the quick settings,
this is the stock launcher that's here,
it's just like a pixel launcher.
And Essential is saying that this has the
fewest pre-loaded apps of
any device that you can get.
If it's not essential to the phone's
working out of the box, or required by Google,
it's not pre-installed here.
But the interesting part about it is that
this is still a high-end phone,
even though it doesn't feel like it from
the terms of having all of these extra features
and little bits of hardware.
It has a Snapdragon 835 inside,
four gigabytes of RAM, and 128 gigabytes of storage.
But two things are missing here
that most people would consider essential.
It doesn't have a headphone jack on the bottom,
nor does it have waterproofing,
even though there are very few
points of ingress on this device.
But aside from that, there is one big feature
of the Essential Phone that is
really kind of the standout and selling point of this thing,
and that's these two little pins right here.
They're little pogo pins that can send and receive power,
and it's designed to let you augment the experience
of the Essential Phone, not unlike Moto Mods
on a Moto Z device.
The difference here is that you don't have to cover
the entire back of the phone to augment it.
Essential is showing off a 360 degree camera
that's about this big and just
clips onto the back with magnets,
and it can transfer data wirelessly to the phone
and just receive power there.
There's also a desktop dock, and, you know,
ideas for a lot of different things,
but the Essential Phone is meant to
be augmented down the road with additional things,
so you don't have to just stick with this device
or this form factor.
Now, we haven't spent a whole bunch of time
with the Essential Phone, but it's
one of the most interesting hardware experiences
that we've seen in a long time.
Samsung really blew us away with the Galaxy S8,
and it looks amazing,
but we can tell that this is the future
of what phones can look like,
with extremely small bezels.
So that was your first look at
the brand new Essential Phone.
It's a phone that I'm super excited about,
not just on its own, but what hardware like this means
for the rest of the industry going forward.
If you wanna learn more about the Essential Phone,
be sure to subscribe to us right here on YouTube,
and read all about it over on androidcentral.com.
Thanks for watching.