Essential Phone PH-1 - Review 2022

The Essential Phone PH-1, the beginning device from Android founder Andy Rubin's new startup, reminds me a fiddling of OnePlus phones and a piddling of Apple tree's original iPhone. Like the OnePlus lineup, information technology has flagship specs at a potentially killer price, at least on its current promotion: $437.37 through Sprint. Like early iPhones, it's a ameliorate pocket estimator than it is a telephone, clearly made by a company without much feel in the realm of voice calling and cellular networks.

Sprint doesn't have any better devices almost this price. But $699 for the unlocked model is a different story, and information technology's hard to justify the Essential's performance at that level. This makes our rating a picayune strange. Our iii.5-star conclusion splits the difference between the two price levels: this is a four-star phone at Sprint'south toll, simply a three-star phone at the unlocked charge per unit.

Pricing

The Essential Phone is existence sold two ways, at very unlike prices. Sprint is offering the phone for $14.58 per month on an 18-month Flex lease; if y'all desire to buy the telephone at the end, you lot pay an additional $174.93, for a total of $437.37, and you own information technology. In that context, this telephone fits firmly into the 'midrange flagship' price category with the OnePlus 5 and ZTE Axon vii, although those phones don't work on Sprint.

Essential is selling an all-carrier-compatible unlocked model for $699, or $29.13 per month for 24 months. That'due south a much less compelling deal, on par with high-end flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel. At that price, Essential's going is much tougher, and we can't detect the big selling indicate that tells you to get this phone and not those.

Concrete Design

The Essential Phone is a solid, elegant, rather glace slab. Its most striking characteristic is its essentially bezel-less screen, which runs right up confronting the top and sides of the telephone, leaving just a little bit of bezel at the lesser.

That means elements normally at the top of the screen get a chip crowded. The front-facing camera actually creates a notch in the display, as you can meet beneath. It doesn't bear on app performance, because that'southward where the status bar is, but information technology'due south striking. The earpiece and alert LED are basically built into the pinnacle edge of the telephone, facing forward. Similar the well-nigh recent LG and Samsung flagships, the telephone uses virtual home and navigation keys at the lesser of the screen.

The PH-1 measures 5.half-dozen by 2.8 past 0.iii inches (HWD) and weighs a solid vi.v ounces, more than nigh of its competitors. Our model has a glass front end and a mirrored blackness ceramic dorsum. In that location's also a white model, with gray and blue-greenish versions coming soon.

The fingerprint scanner on the dorsum is dissever from the power button on the side. On the bottom, in that location's a single speaker, a USB-C port, and a SIM card slot. There'due south no headphone jack, but the phone comes with a USB-C-to-3.5mm dongle, as well every bit a USB-C cord with a quick-charging adapter. The phone is non water-resistant.

Tall and thin displays are trendy now, and the Essential Phone's 5.7-inch screen features a unique 19:10 aspect ratio, which is narrower than older 16:9 phones, but not as tall and slim as Samsung's xviii.five:9 Galaxy S8. At 2.8 inches wide, information technology'due south still usable with just one hand (barely). The two,560-past-1,312-pixel resolution is unique too, although third-political party apps don't seem to have a problem with information technology.

The LCD has gorgeously rich colors—almost AMOLED-level—just isn't as vivid as some of its competitors. Held side-by-side with the LG G6 and Milky way S8, the G6 appears slightly brighter, and the Galaxy S8 is considerably less reflective, making information technology more than easily visible outdoors.

Head to the back once again to find something very intriguing: two shiny contacts that function equally an I/O port for specialized accessories. The accessories snap on with magnets. The first one is a 360-degree camera, which we oasis't even so tested, but is reminiscent of the Moto 360 Camera for Motorola'due south Moto Mod-compatible phones. A charging dock will follow. We're excited about the potential for accessories, but we're not going to recommend a telephone based on accessories nosotros haven't seen.

Android and Performance

Equally befits a phone from the creator of Android, the PH-1 runs a minimalist version of Android 7.1.1 Nougat, with all of Google'south apps and no duplicates. Sprint adds ii apps, My Sprint and Tidal, the latter of which yous can delete. The very sparse Android build means information technology'southward going to be easier for Essential to offer software updates, and the company promises two years of Android updates.

Benchmarks practise not properly depict how velvety smooth the Essential Phone'south functioning is. The Essential Phone benchmarked on par with other Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 phones like the Milky way S8, HTC U11, and OnePlus 5 on the AnTuTu and PCMark benchmarks. It scored 161,746 on AnTuTu and 6,592 on PCMark Work, while the Milky way S8 scored 158,266 and 6,905 respectively.

I apply the Samsung Milky way S8 daily, and I love information technology (it's our Editors' Choice, afterward all). But information technology's widely understood that the Google Pixel'south UI is just a affect smoother. The Essential Phone feels like a Pixel with an even faster processor, which is exactly what it is (the Pixel has a Snapdragon 821). Android apps perform gloriously, and scrolling couldn't be smoother. The phone does get noticeably hot when it's doing something intense similar benchmarks, just that didn't seem to impact performance in our tests.

Out of 128GB, the phone has 116GB of available storage (there'due south no memory card slot, though) and 4GB of RAM. We're still in the process of testing its three,040mAh battery, and will update this section equally soon as we have a result.

Call Quality and Network

An update to the Essential Phone's software, right before launch, vaulted its calling performance from downright bad to acceptably decent. That really shows the difference firmware can make, and we wait farther improvements with time.

I compared the Essential Phone with the LG G6 and Milky way S8 on Sprint'due south network. With the latest software update, the Essential Phone had consistent vocalization quality without the skips and dropouts I heard on the previous software version. Voices were a little harsh, but not computery. Transmissions through the microphone didn't entirely cancel background racket, just my vocalism came out front and middle on the other finish of the call. The PH-i supports VoLTE and Wi-Fi calling on networks that use those features.

The phone'southward physical blueprint also makes calling feel a little odd. Because the earpiece is all the way at the top, the audio sweet spot is up there with it, which means you need to place the phone lower on your ear than you lot're probably used to.

Related Story Run into How Nosotros Test Phones

The PH-one has frequency bands to piece of work on every US carrier, and Essential says the $699 unlocked model will work with the big iv in the Usa. But side-past-side speed examination performance on Sprint's network fell short of the LG G6, and is likely to fall short of the Galaxy S8 and Moto Z2 Forcefulness as well, because the phone is missing key network features. It has 3x carrier assemblage, simply not 4x4 MIMO or Sprint's HPUE coverage extender.

In 10 tests across a range of network conditions, the Essential Telephone averaged 10.05Mbps down where the LG G6 averaged 21.94Mbps. Just as chiefly, the G6 was faster than the Essential Phone lxxx pct of the fourth dimension.

This, by the mode, is why I tend to exist skeptical of cell phone startups. Phonation quality, LTE, and RF front-end are nonetheless a type of black magic, and they're very hard for beginners to go right. I'd argue it took until the iPhone 4S for Apple to really smash them, and that was the telephone's fifth iteration.

Essential is on more solid ground with LAN technologies. The phone supports dual-ring 802.11ac, and tested against a Galaxy S8, it proved to be a hair meliorate in weak Wi-Fi weather condition. Bluetooth 5.0 is also present, every bit is NFC, and both work just fine.

Camera and Image Quality

The Essential Phone comes with dual 13-megapixel lenses on the back, one color and i monochrome, as well every bit an 8MP front end-facing shooter. The dual cameras are a Qualcomm Clear Sight setup designed to improve contrast and low-light functioning. Articulate Sight takes advantage of the fact that without a colour filter, a photographic camera's lens can capture more low-cal. So the black-and-white lens captures fine detail, and the color sensor and so fills in the colors.

The aforementioned firmware update right before launch significantly improved low-light camera quality, but not by much. I think at that place are more software updates to come.

In skilful lighting weather, the Essential takes photos that might even rival the Milky way S8, our favorite camera phone. Its dynamic range is better, delivering truer shadow areas while not stinting on brighter parts of the picture. The new update likewise brings HDR imaging, which should take been in that location all along.

But something software-wise is yet wrong with low-light performance. It's much worse than I await from an f/i.8 camera, and shows no Clear Sight reward at all. Fifty-fifty with the most contempo software update, in poorly lit conditions, photos taken with the PH-1 are virtually on par with a midrange telephone like the Motorola G5 Plus. They're smeary and much dimmer than the Milky way S8 or Pixel's photos. Dropping to monochrome mode improves depression-light performance, just then yous get black-and-white photos. There's also, surprisingly, no bokeh or portrait mode, which you get on about dual-camera phones.

The camera app itself can likewise use some work. Information technology'southward noticeably slower to salvage photos than the Galaxy S8 is, and the new software update introduced a bug where sometimes, in low light, the shutter push simply doesn't piece of work. (It wouldn't have great photos in those conditions anyway, and then maybe that's really a mixed blessing.)

Images taken with the front end photographic camera are par for the form for a high-cease smartphone. Low-calorie-free operation is boosted by the default 'selfie flash,' which flashes the screen earlier it takes an image. In very low lite, images go a little noisy, merely stay sharp.

The rear cameras tape 4K video at 30 frames per second in fifty-fifty low light, and the front end camera records smoothen 1080p video at 30 frames per second.

Comparisons and Conclusions

The Essential Phone is a proficient first try. Information technology usually takes new manufacturers a few models to go the tricky parts of phone-making right. Essential is well-funded, and if information technology iterates rapidly, it could exist a strong competitor.

Merely the Essential Phone PH-1 is a version 1.0, a get-go phone from a brand-new company, and it shows. It may be a physically smooth slab of glass and titanium with powerful hardware, only from a software perspective, it's still rough around the edges. Hopefully, additional firmware updates can further improve the camera performance. At $699 unlocked, though, we can't recommend this over the Google Pixel, the Samsung Galaxy S8, or the presumably upcoming Pixel 2.

But Sprint's current price promotion changes a lot, specially if voice quality doesn't affair that much to you. At $437, the PH-1 is practically a steal. Especially when you consider the similarly priced OnePlus 5 and ZTE Axon 7 don't piece of work on Sprint'south network, the Essential beats the year-old and midrange phones you'll become from the carrier in the $200 to $400 range. And then if you lot're buying the phone on Dart, increment the score you run into at the top of the page by another half star.