Since its shaky release, the Essential Phone has received quite a number of discounts, with the best of all showing up on Cyber Monday 2017, where the phone was priced at just $399 on Amazon, and this included a free 4K 360-degree camera.
This deal is no more, but the Essential Phone is now available at a price that many would have wanted from the beginning. At launch, the phone was priced at $699 and even though it’s a great answer to the Apple iPhone X, some were not so convinced about it, especially after it experienced massive delays before eventually being released.
The Essential Phone is a great piece of hardware, but given that it was Essential’s first attempt in the smartphone business, even with the father of Android on board, it was never going to be easy to convince people to spend $699 on an unproven company. Andy Rubin and his team missed the trick, but Carl Pei and hit the nail on the head with their strategy.
Since the launch of the OnePlus One, OnePlus has been increasing the price of its devices gradually. The company traditionally offers devices packed with high-end specs and features yet priced at nearly half the price of the flagship phones. The latest is the OnePlus 5T, which came out this month and has been selling like no other, regardless of the market.
In terms of hardware, the OnePlus 5T and Essential Phone aren’t so distant apart. In fact, the latter is only dwarfed in terms of RAM, where it ships with a 4GB module as opposed to the 5T’s 6GB and 8GB on the high-end model. As for the storage, the PH-1 has 128GB of non-expandable storage, which is the same amount available on the high-end 5T. The base model has 64GB.
Both phones are powered by a Snapdragon 835 processor and while the PH-1 has near stock Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box, you’ll come across the pretty impressive OxygenOS on top of the same version of Nougat on the OnePlus 5T. The Essential Phone has a dual-lens 13MP camera with an aperture of f/1.9 while the front gets an 8MP lens. There were some initial complaints about the camera, but Essential has since rolled out software updates with improvements.
The OnePlus 5T, on the other hand, comes with a dual-lens 16MP+20MP camera with a larger f/1.7 aperture while the front has a massive 16MP lens for selfies. These are flagship phones, so you can expect all the bells and whistles associated with high-end phones. Keeping the 5T alive is a 3300mAh battery unit while the PH-1 has a 3040mAh unit, which isn’t bad for its relatively smaller 5.71-inch QHD LCD display as opposed to the 5T’s 6-inch full HD AMOLED screen.
There’s no doubt that the OnePlus 5T’s massive demand is directly associated to the price and specs combination the phone offers. Given that the Essential Phone has now dropped to this category, offering users with a great price and specs combination, can it compete with the 5T?