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."

Comments

Unique look and feel?

[TheRaven64]

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?

Re:Unique look and feel?

[omnichad]

looks and feels like an Android phone. What makes it unique?

That's exactly what I'm looking for. A plain, ordinary Android phone. My current and last phones were both Nexus phones. At $499, I would actually consider one of these.

Re:Unique look and feel?

[PPalmgren]

Motorola has a good hold on that market. Their android skinning is very limited and their phones have already been in that ballpark. I was interested in the essential phone, but at the price compared to my Moto Z it just wasn't worth it.

Re:Unique look and feel?

[samwichse]

I would consider one if it had a headphone jack.

I might buy one if it had stereo speakers. My current phone has both of these and I find them such useful features I'll never buy a phone again without them.

As it is, as soon as I saw the lack of the jack, I just said "nope" and moved on.

Way to have "courage," Essenial. Courage to remove features before you've even established yourself.

Re: Unique look and feel?

[Rob Y.]

Maybe, but if this thing gets decent software support - and is unlockable so that it can run LineageOS - it's a pretty good deal at that price. Better hardware than the One Plus 5. I got a ZTE Axon 7 last year when the midrange 'flagships' were coming on strong. Hardware is great for the price, but ZTE has backtracked on their promise of openness, to the point that I don't know if my 11 month old phone is going to get any more security patches - let alone OS upgrades. It might (and I'm still hopeful), but next time, it's going to be unlocked out of the gate or nothing.

Essential tried to go for flagship pricing out of the gate - and at that level, anything less than perfection is death. Their camera software was supposedly lousy, and a few initial bad reviews were enough to prevent them from recovering once they fixed it. But at $499, they're probably the best device in that near flagship category. It'd be nice if they were to settle for that and keep producing great bargain hardware, but I suspect that if they can't get the hype machine going again, they'll fade away. Who knows...

Re:Unique look and feel?

[thegarbz]

Anyone bought one and found something unique in it?

It ships with a black blemish at the top of the screen making it look defective out of the box.

Re:What a surprise!

[Desler]

It’s now the EssentiallyDead phone.

Re:sprint only??

[raburton]

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.

Re:I'll pay full price if...

[Anonymous Coward]

No god can help you when you are facing stupidity such as removing the headphone jack.

Overpriced, over hyped NOBODY

[p51d007]

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.

Re:Overpriced, over hyped NOBODY

[fred6666]

Why would you trust the hardware switch anymore than the software switch? In both cases you have to trust the vendor.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Selling world-wide (ROW) would also help

[ReneR]

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.

Utterly un-repairable

[sremick]

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.

j/k

[cloud.pt]

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.

Overpriced device moved on hype alone

[XSportSeeker]

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.

An idea

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

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.