Essential Phone review: edge-to-edge screen is great, good performance and battery life, but has a mediocre camera, an unproven module system, and no 3.5mm jack
An arcane artifact from an unrealized future — Even though it was announced less than three months ago at the Code Conference …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two and a half months after Andy Rubin's Essential debuted the phone at Code Conference with a 5.71-inch edge-to-edge display and $699 preorders (the May launch), The Verge's verdict is in: the screen, performance, and battery deliver, but the camera is mediocre, the accessory module system is unproven, and the headphone jack is gone.
The sales picture behind the review looks soft — the phone's camera app has been downloaded only about 50,000 times on Google Play, a proxy suggesting limited device shipments. The longer arc matters too: when this publication revisits the edge-to-edge formula in later years, it is reviewing Motorola's Edge line and Nothing's phone (1), not Essential.
First-order effects
- Early adopters paying $699 get a genuinely good edge-to-edge screen and battery life but inherit a mediocre camera and bet on a modular accessory system with no track record.
Second-order effects
- Roughly 50,000 camera-app downloads imply weak unit sales, which starves the unproven module system of the installed base third-party accessory makers would need before committing to the platform.
Third-order effects
- The design idea outlives the company: by 2022-2025 the edge-to-edge lineage in this coverage belongs to Motorola's Edge Plus and Edge 70 and Nothing's phone (1), showing how hard it is for a well-funded Android founder's startup to convert a hardware signature into a durable franchise against incumbents.
The trend: Edge-to-edge displays traveled from a 2017 flagship differentiator to a baseline expectation across midrange phones, while the startups that pioneered them struggled to hold the market they opened.