Slashdot Mirror
Essential Phone Now Supported By All Four Major Carriers (Including Verizon) (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:
Essential's debut smartphone has received approval to run on Verizon, meaning it's now supported by all four major US carriers. Sprint was the device's launch partner, so it of course had support, and both AT&T and T-Mobile gave tacit support ahead of the phone's launch. But Verizon, for some reason, said it couldn't guarantee that the Essential Phone would work and that the phone still had to clear a certification process. Evidently it's now done that, with Essential tweeting out this morning that the phone is now compatible with Verizon.
Checking out their FAQ, they are a slight improvement on Android phones in that their mission is supposedly to 'play well w/ others' and actually belong to you. However, they do lack expandable storage (although their main storage of 128GB may well be adequate), dual SIMs and replaceable batteries. However, their bootloader can be unlocked.
One major beef I have w/ Android phones is that since Marshmallow, I haven't seen a single Android phone that comes w/ SD card - precisely b'cos Marshmallow allows one to get around a limited storage by putting in, say, a 128GB or more SD card and defining it as the primary storage.
The phone looks good, but let's recap:
- no headphone jack;
- "premium" materials that makes the phone more expensive, harder but more brittle, and heavier without good reason other than aesthetics;
- no SD card reader;
- very bad initial costumer support;
- delays and broken promises;
- "stock" Android that's not really stock - it has almost no difference from vanilla Android (apart from the 360 camera software), but in truth Essencial is still a middleman between Android updates and the non-skin they have there.
- flagship price for the first phone of the brand that, predictably, already had several bumps on release - wonky camera, os/software not customized to deal with the selfie camera bump, some fingerprint reader weirdness...
People should just wait for Essencial Phone 2 or whatever comes next if Andy Rubin keeps going. Unfortunately, there isn't a single thing that makes this phone unique or essencial in any sense. Not the price, not specs, not new features, not camera, not software. The phones that are coming out with Android One deserves far more to be called essencial.