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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's an Android phone, that looks and feels like an Android phone. What makes it unique? Reading their web site, I'm not seeing anything compelling. Anyone bought one and found something unique in it?
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It’s now the EssentiallyDead phone.
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.
No god can help you when you are facing stupidity such as removing the headphone jack.
Outside the "tech" blogsphere, no one knows who this guy or his company is. Price it at 350-400 dollars, they MIGHT sell a few more.
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I like the clean look, however, can't even get it here in Europe. Even if I'd wanted, ignoring the missing headphone jack and sub-par camera for that hefty original price. For 499 I might further look over those sub-optimal points, but still can't get it anywhere here, anyways.
I'd spend the money on the marketing campaign. Nobody I know outside of tech knows what it is.
Is it just me or does a price cut that big this close to launch sound an awful lot like they made a lot more devices than they could sell and are now trying to clear out inventory? Nice for those looking to buy a high end android device cheap, but can't be all that great for their bottom line.
Price cuts like this are pretty much always the result of companies overstating demand at the initial price and often include a warehouse full of unsold inventory. They either plan on making back the money on connected revenue streams (like games and peripherals for consoles) or then just want to clear inventory to stay liquid. Regardless of their reasons for selling stuff at a loss, the value of this inventory would eventually have to at least partly be written off as you can never keep products in inventory for a long time and expect to sell it at the original price.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
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.
Many around here would still prefer to pay full price if it brought them a headphone jack, replaceable battery, uSD support, IP67 or above, dual SIM and OLED tech, and maybe 2-4 extra GB of RAM. Hell, I bet they would even pay iPhone X 256GB numbers.
Now seriously, with all of the above, that would make this a perfect phone.Not just essential.
The essential reminds me of the Nexus days, where a flagship class phone could be had for a reasonable price.
The Nexus 4 launched at $300 for the base model and after 8 months went down to $200. That's a big difference, although I think the Essential is more "flagship" (in the sense of higher spec, not so much in the big name sense compared to Google/LG) than the Nexus 4 was at the time.
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.
The vast majority of people do.
In Belgium locked phones are forbidden. Many people will buy phones with a provider, but the phone can not be locked and so many providers will just sell the phone.
Yet many will just buy them somewhere else and just change the chip.
It is also easy to switch providers and keep your number. This will be done in the same day and takes just a few hours. New SIM, Get an SMS. Change the SIM. I have not changed my number in 10 years and I have had 5 providers. Once a year I look if others are cheaper for me.
At this moment there is no roaming cost anymore in Europe, so now I am waiting that the international calling prices in Europe are gone and I will look for a country where the calls are cheaper. I would love to have e.g. a Polish or Spanish number if it is cheaper for me as well as not more expensive for people to contact me.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
For the most part all of that is true in the UK too. Phones are often locked, but the networks will generally unlock them for free, at least once you are out of contract. What I assume is different here vs Belgium is that when people get the phone from the network they aren't paying up front for it, they get it "free" (or almost) on an expensive monthly contract (essentially a hire-purchase agreement, not sure if that term is familiar in Belgium). So there is little point having your phone unlocked at time of purchase, or before the end of your contract, because you're tied in to the network for typically 2 years anyway.
Your roaming idea is interesting, but I suspect it will fall down on costs to call you. Certainly from here calling a foreign mobile is very expensive and the EU roaming situation doesn't cover that. I suspect that's not something that will ever be regulated. Also, foreign customer service related issues could be a problem. On the plus side, as a roamer in your own country, you'd have access to all the networks there instead of only being able to connect to your own, potentially giving your much better coverage.
There's definitely a market for a Nexus replacement (stock Android, fast updates, medium price ~$400-500 and close to top specs) and I'm curious why companies shun this idea.
The closest we get now is OnePlus but it's not without its quirks.
Essential may have over committed on build or their suppliers offering discounts since over estimated demand and have excess capacity or a mix. Regardless A media marketing blitz spending would have poor returns, price typically a safer bet. Lame spin doctoring but what else can they say? Good luck even at $499 the nice features are not so compelling to make up for its short comings ( poor camera:( Expensive lesson for a new device company. Prioritize features and pricing tier. They did some good things so might be able to recover on another model.
$95 a month!?!?! What on earth are you getting for that? Even after you take $700 off for the phone you're giving your network over $1500 for 2 years of cell phone use. For comparison in the UK I've paid £0.99/month for the last 2 years, on a contract only deal (and after cashback).
I think 500 bucks is a fair enough price of an Android smartphone brand with no history and premium hardware feature. At this price, the smartphone lies almost in the same niche where Google's Nexus phones and the Oneplus phones used to be. Having said that, personally I am not buying once of these because there is no headphone jack. Sorry folks, whoever you are, buy you will never convince me that not having a headphone jack is actually some kind of progress or good for consumers.