Essential Needs a Do-Over, Not a New Color (Premium)

Essential certainly doesn't need any more bad press. But it brought this one on itself.

In the wake of one of the worst product launch years imaginable, erstwhile smartphone maker Essential tweeted yesterday that "a new wave is coming." Hearing that, many would logically assume that the firm is set to release a second generation Essential Phone in a bid to fix the first phone's many issues, most particularly its lackluster camera.

Sorry. That's not happening.

As the tweet itself hints via its green- and gold-tinted graphic, all Essential is really announcing is that its first-generation PH1- phone will arrive in the "Ocean Depths" color scheme that it promoted last spring. Right. Nine months after it was first announced, Essential will finally ship its phone in the one color scheme that everyone wanted.

"Essential comes in four fun colors: Black Moon, Stellar Gray, Pure White, and Ocean Depths," I wrote in May 2017. "Yes, everyone wants the latter one, it’s beautiful."

But The Essential Phone really only came in two colors, Black Moon and Pure White, for most of its short and poorly-selling lifetime. The others have been missing in action for the duration. And there's still no word on Stellar Gray.

What's sorely needed, of course, is a new phone.

And, perhaps, a new strategy: When Andy Rubin first revealed Essential and its first phone, the big emphasis was on the company's goals of rethinking smartphone ecosystem.

It started small, with a Moto Mods-like magnetic connector that could seat various peripherals, though only one, a 360-degree camera was ever released. This was clearly a response to Rubin's previous employer, Google, canceling Project Ara, a modular smartphone platform, in favor of the more traditional Pixel line.

There was also a smart speaker-like peripheral called Essential Home that the firm never shipped. That product, which is still billed as "coming soon," provides some insight into a future that Essential once saw for itself: As a middleman that could connect various incompatible smart home devices with phones in a seamless manner, akin to what Apple is attempting with HomeKit. Alas, it's pretty clear that Essential's future, such as it is, will be a lot less all-encompassing than the original plan.

I still like the ideas here, and I hope that Essential has the resources to ship an improved, second-generation PH-2 phone. I am still very interested in reviewing these products, though Essential has gone dark after initially agreeing to let me do so. So I can only assume that things are going poorly.

And that an Ocean Depths version of its first phone, no matter how pretty, won't help the situation very much.

 

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