REVIEW: The Essential Phone is a superb smartphone

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After testing the Essential Phone for the last week, I can confirm my initial impression: It's a superb device.

In fact, I could easily see myself buying a Phone for my next smartphone.

The Phone is the first product from Essential, a startup founded and led by Andy Rubin, the "Father of Android." Its price, design, operating system, and camera all make it first rate.

But that doesn't mean it's perfect. As might be expected for the first gadget from a brand-new company, the Phone has a few kinks that need to be ironed out. Among its big shortcomings: It lacks a headphone jack.

Check out my thoughts about the Essential Phone:

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The Essential Phone is the most beautiful smartphone on the market.

The Phone's square edges, ceramic back and titanium frame give it a premium feel. Its design makes the Phone heavier and less comfortable to hold than Apple's iPhone 7 or Samsung's Galaxy S8. But it also makes the device more substantial. Picking up the Phone is an occasion. The iPhone 7 and the Galaxy S8, by contrast, feel like mere objects that are just doing their jobs.

The Phone feels like the beautiful expensive watch or piece of jewelry you reserve for fancy dress-up events, but that you avoid wearing on a daily basis for fear of damage or loss.

But in actuality, the Phone is designed to be used every day. It doesn't cost more than other premium phones, and it retains its beauty with regular use.

I've been treating the Phone the same way I treat my iPhone, but there's no sign of scratches on its ceramic back or screen. It's only been a week, but so far, Essential's claims about the scratch resistance of the Phone's ceramic back appear valid. You just have to wipe the fingerprints off its glossy surface from time to time.

Some thoughts on the "notch."

The Phone's front camera is located in a "notch" at the top of its screen. Although it's noticeable, the notch didn't bother me at all.

However, many apps haven't been designed to work around the feature. Those apps can't display content in the screen space on either side of the notch. essential phone

Some apps simply fill in that screen space with their overall color theme. Other apps turn the screen space on either side of the notch black. That makes it look like the Phone has a much larger top bezel than it actually has, which is unfortunate.

Essential told me that it's encouraging top developers to redesign their apps to make use of the screen space on either side of the notch. So your favorite apps may eventually be updated to support it.

Compared to the Phone, the Galaxy S8's ultra-slim bezels look big.

Somehow, despite the border at the bottom of its screen, the Phone makes the Galaxy S8 look like an older smartphone with traditionally sized bezels. And it makes the bezels on the iPhone look positively huge and the iPhone's design ancient.

The Phone has a gorgeous 5.71-inch IPS display that offers inky blacks and colors that pop. The display is sharper and far superior to that on the iPhone 7, and its performance nears that of Samsung's best-in-class AMOLED display on the S8.

The S8's display still bests the Phone's, because it's slightly sharper and produces deeper blacks. That's due to its screen technology; parts of an AMOLED display will actually turn off when displaying dark scenes.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider