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Android Creator Andy Rubin Launches Top-of-the-line Essential Phone (theverge.com)
The much-anticipated smartphone from Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, is here. It's called the Essential Phone, and it runs a custom version of Android. Priced at $699, the Essential Phone offers top-of-the-line specifications including "an edge-to-edge display that one-ups even the Samsung Galaxy S8 by bringing it all the way to the the top of the phone, wrapping around the front-facing selfie camera." From a report on The Verge: It's a unique take on a big screen that makes the phone stand out -- and it's smart too. Often, the status bar at the top of an Android phone doesn't fill that middle space with icons, so it's efficient. The screen does leave some bezel at the bottom of the phone, but nevertheless it's as close to the whole front of a phone being display as I've seen. Essential is launching the phone in the US to start, and it's filled the phone with radios that should make it work on all major carriers, alongside usual Android flagship internals like a Qualcomm 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. [...] Essential will ship a 360-degree camera that can click in to the top of the phone, and the company will also offer a charging dock. Both connect to the phone with small metal pogo pins. They won't entirely replace USB-C for most people, but Essential is clearly hoping that they could someday. Speaking of ports, there is no traditional 3.5mm headphone jack -- which is a bummer. We're told that it will ship with a headphone dongle in the box.
No headphones jack - no money
it's as close to the whole front of a phone being display as I've seen
The Xiaomi Mi Mix doesn't f up the screen with the front camera by adding it at the bottom, where both this and theirs don't have a screen.
Some screenshots give the impression the screen isn't so large, but that's due to the on screen controls having a black background.
Retina and Retina HD are marketing terms invented by Apple. They're trademarked, and nobody else can use them.
A "Retina" display is any display with a density between 300ppi and 325ppi. A "Retina HD" display is any display with a density >= 326ppi. The iPhone 7 has a 326ppi display, the iPhone 7 Plus has a 401ppi display, so those are both "Retina HD".
The Samsung Galaxy S8 has 571ppi. The Essential Phone has 503ppi. So they both have higher densities that outclass the current generation iPhone. If they were Apple devices, Apple would probably call them "Retina UHD" or something.
I have a phone with a small bezel on the left/right sides. When I hold my phone, the fleshy part of my hand overlaps the bezel and makes contact with the screen, which the phone interprets as a "touch". I already have my phone in a case, and yet this STILL happens. I would probably find the Samsung edge phones to be completely unusable.
I don't want a bezel-less phone. Only phone designers want a bezel-less phone. I have no idea why. What I *DO* want is increased battery life. They should work on that instead.
Any time someone with a no bezel phone hands it to me, I have to treat it like I'm defusing a bomb. Almost inevitably a fraction of a finger touches the screen and there goes whatever I was supposed to look at. Leave enough of a bezel that the phone can be handed off to another person.
Actually I wanted to ask whether its software makeup is free of the pesky "cannot-remove-the-google-crap"
Or you could just disable it, and you'll never even notice that it is there unless you go way deep into the settings menu.
requires you to root and flash it, but if it fails already at the hardware level
Personally, I'm less and less interested in rooting phones. Rooting is good for adding features that aren't included stock, which was important in the early days because a lot of phones were outright incapable of doing certain things without going beyond the software stack. But these days, not only are the phones quite feature packed, but the UI is well designed too. The only reason I root is so I can use my call recording app and CF.lumen. Most phones can record calls except for the Nexus and Pixel line, unfortunately, but newer versions of Android make CF.lumen irrelevant. My current phone is a Nexus 6P, and more than likely I won't need to root with whatever I have next (which I'll probably upgrade to when the 6P stops getting updates.)
And good riddance to be honest. Rooting means you have to manually intervene every month in order for your phone to be able to take updates, which is annoying, and some apps do different things to detect root, which you have to do some hackery to get around.