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Essential Announces $200 (29%) Discount on Phones -- Price Dropped To $499 (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quote CNET:
The heavily hyped, Andy Rubin-backed Essential phone launched late in August. Now, two months later, its price has been cut from $699 to $499. The news was announced in a Sunday blog post by company president Niccolo de Masi. He said the price cut comes in lieu of the company spending money on an expensive marketing campaign. "We could have created a massive TV campaign to capture your attention," Masi wrote, "but we think making it easier for people to get their hands on our first products is a better way to get to know us." A spokesperson added to this, telling CNET, "We've heard from many people that once they got their hands on an Essential Phone they were hooked by the device's unique look and feel... it was a strategic decision to invest in bold pricing to get our products into more hands instead of traditional marketing such as TV to generate awareness and word of mouth."
"There is really no other way to read the move except as a signal that it wasn't selling well at $699," counters the Verge, "especially given that the only U.S. carrier stores it's available in have 'Sprint' above the door. It certainly doesn't help that it now has to face the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL head-to-head."
"To help salve the burn that customers who paid the full price might be feeling, the company is offering a $200 Essential Store 'friends & family code' to be used towards the purchase of another phone or a module."
"There is really no other way to read the move except as a signal that it wasn't selling well at $699," counters the Verge, "especially given that the only U.S. carrier stores it's available in have 'Sprint' above the door. It certainly doesn't help that it now has to face the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL head-to-head."
"To help salve the burn that customers who paid the full price might be feeling, the company is offering a $200 Essential Store 'friends & family code' to be used towards the purchase of another phone or a module."
It doesn't say only sprint stores, it says the only carrier stores are sprint stores, i.e. other networks aren't selling the phone themselves. At least here in the UK a significant proportion of people still get their phones direct from the networks instead of buying them outright.
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A junk phone that is pretty much completely unrepairable? iFixit score of 1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...
Locked bootloader, no headphone jack, no MicroSD slot, zero repairability... the Essential Phone is lacking a ton of "essential" things.
Lower the price all you want, I'm not buying this piece of shit.
Well, of course this happened.
Let's see here. It's an Android phone that has ALMOST vanilla Android... but it still has to go through Essencial for updates, so it's vanilla Android with one of the biggest problems of non-vanilla Android.
The phone suffered delays, left early adopters angry, and had major camera issues on release.
The flashy stuff about it is either useless, surface level only or cosmetic, or just following trends.
Ceramics body makes the device more brittle and heavy (poor combination) without offering any protection advantage other than being a bit more scratch proof. Same for titanium. Essencially, you are much more prone to damage this camera than most others in the market.
The Moto Mod style port only has a 360 camera to show, which is something most people don't care about.
Doesn't have a headphone jack or an SD card reader, make it less than "essencial".
And of course, the company didn't pay attention to one of the most essencial parts of a phone: the camera.
I just hope that at least it gets nice reception and has a good fast Wi-fi chip in it. Otherwise, there doesn't really seem to be anything essencial about it.
The death knell was the price. And I'm honestly not sure if lowering at this point in time will do it any favors. Some people will reconsider, but the hype is over, and generous people already said that "well, perhaps the next model". Not so generous people will be skipping the brand altogether.
Too little, too late.