Andy Rubin, the inventor of Android, finally revealed his new smartphone today, called Essential. 
 
 Rubin teased a photo of the new smartphone on Twitter back in March; it will, unsurprisingly, run Android. 
 
 Rubin will say more about his new company and smartphone on Recode’s Code Conference stage where he will be interviewed by Walt Mossberg; you can watch live here. 
 
 Unlike Apple, which tends to be selective about what apps can run on the iPhone and only until recently started letting users delete unwanted apps that came pre-installed, Essential is touting itself as a company that values user choice and interoperability first. 
 
 “Devices are your personal property,” Rubin wrote in a blog post today announcing his new company. “We won’t force you to have anything on them you don’t want to have.” 
 
 He continues by hinting that Essential won’t have a product schedule premised on planned obsolescence that forces customers to update their device every year. Rather, he says, devices “should evolve with you.” 
 
 “We will always play well with others. Closed ecosystems are divisive and outdated,” writes Rubin. 
 
 The first smartphone from Essential features a screen that stretches to cover the full front of the phone. Even the camera lens is embedded in the screen. The phone comes with 128 gigabytes of storage and can take 13-megapixel pictures and 4K videos. 
 
 Looking at the new smartphone, you won’t know who made it. That’s because Rubin’s team decided not to put any logos on its titanium and ceramic exterior, materials Essential chose because they don’t blemish, “unlike the aluminum competitor devices,” the website reads. 
 
 The phone also doesn’t have a headphone jack, so, like the iPhone 7, users will be forced to either use a dongle or wireless headphones. 
 
 Essential isn’t just planning to be a smartphone maker. The company is also touting an Essential Home device. 
 
 The Essential Home has a screen, making it look a bit like the Echo Show from Amazon, and shares a name with the smart-home hub from Rubin’s former employer, Google. 
 
 But the feature that Rubin’s new company thinks will set its Home apart from the others is privacy. Essential Home is designed to run most of its functions locally on the device, in order to keep as much data as possible in the home. This is different from the way many smart-home devices work, where data collected from the home is stored on a distant server, as opposed to on the device itself. 
 
 The Essential Phone is available now for preorder for $699 and comes in four colors: Black Moon, Stellar Gray, Pure White and Ocean Depths. The Essential Home device is not yet available for preorder and no price is listed. 
 
 Watch: Andy Rubin and the Essential Phone ||||| If the future of tech starts with the phone, then Andy Rubin's new company Essential started in the right place. But at first glance the Essential Phone looks more like another bleeding-edge Android phone than something completely new. 
 
 The founder of Android, Rubin created his own company, and that company's first product is a phone. In fact, it's called the "Phone." It runs Android, but it's also the key piece in a dream suite of smart home and modular devices that Essential plans to release over the next year and beyond. 
 
 Essential 
 
 It's expensive 
 
 At $699, the Essential Phone is a premium device. (UK and Australian details have yet to be announced -- it's US-only for now -- but that converts to about £550 or AU$940.) It's also got a crazy amount of screen, removing the bezel almost completely and even wrapping the 5.71-inch display around the front camera. 
 
 The specs sound competitive with other top-end phones on the market, including the LG G6 and Samsung Galaxy S8. It has dual cameras, the popular and powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip and a titanium and ceramic-bodied design. 
 
 It has magnetic mods 
 
 Much like the Moto Z, a small magnetic connector on the back works with a future collection of add-on accessories. 
 
 The first is a 360 camera, which Essential claims is the smallest for a phone. It definitely looks smaller than the the Samsung Gear 360, but promises to shoot 3,840x1,920 pixels at 30 frames per second with two 12-megapixel f/1.8 lens 210-degree cameras and four microphones. 
 
 Essential 
 
 Unlike the Moto Z, the Essential's mods seem to attach nearly invisibly. The 360 camera snaps on next to the rear camera at the top of the device with two pins. Motorola uses a larger strip of exposed pins on the bottom of its modular phones. 
 
 There's also a contactless charging dock, which is sold separately. The phone comes with a 27-watt fast-charging USB-C adapter in-box. 
 
 It's made of titanium 
 
 Essential's sleek launch page promises that the phone's ceramic and titanium body will be extremely durable. The slab is minimalist and logo-free, and with its fingerprint sensor on the back it looks like the Google Pixel mixed with the Galaxy S8's all-screen look. 
 
 Yes, there's a dual camera (or a 360 one) 
 
 It's become standard to throw a dual camera onto high-end phones now. The Essential Phone promises to have the slimmest design, and a combination monochrome/RGB camera with an intense focus on low-light performance. 
 
 Essential 
 
 How is this different from other Android phones, really? 
 
 Rubin's other mission -- the larger one -- is for a connected, ambient operating system called Ambient OS that knits together home, phone and other things. This Ambient OS isn't clearly explained yet, but should be home-focused, and will live on the Essential Home smart speaker to connect smart devices using Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. 
 
 It's all a little unclear, however, whether Essential's phone is an essential part of that Ambient OS equation, and how. It's first and foremost a premium Android phone, but it could end up tapping into Ambient OS. We also don't know what other customized software is running on Essential's phone beyond Android. The cut-around-the-front camera display seems to be unique, and could be customized to fit certain notifications at the top. 
 
 Colors: four 
 
 The Phone comes in "black moon" and "pure white" for now, with "stellar gray" and "ocean depths" (a muted green) soon. 
 
 Notable downsides: No water resistance, no headphone jack 
 
 The Essential Phone PH-1 (the phone's official model name) uses USB-C but ditches the headphone jack, like the iPhone 7. No mention of any water resistance, however, means this phone may want to stay away from serious splashes. 
 
 Essential does throw a USB-C headphone adapter in the box, at least. 
 
 Cost and specs 
 
 The PH-1 costs $699 to preorder, or $749 (roughly £580 or $AU1,000) for the phone plus the 360 camera, which is normally a $200 add-on. It's only being sold online in the US for now. ||||| As the co-founder of Android, Andy Rubin was one of the most important figures in the development of modern smartphones. So when he unveiled his latest project today — a new company called Essential that will sell a high-end smartphone — the technology world paid attention. 
 
 The Essential Phone, a $699 device whose release date hasn’t yet been announced, will be made out of titanium, which Essential says is more durable than the aluminum and plastic enclosures that are common today’s smartphones. The screen covers practically the entire front of the phone. It also has a unique magnetic connector for accessories, including a tiny 360-degree camera that’s also offered by Essential. 
 
 But overall, the Essential Phone seems remarkably similar to devices that are already on the market. It runs a standard version of the Android operating system Rubin created, and in most respects it looks little different from smartphones you can buy today from Apple or Samsung. In other words, one of the smartphone industry’s greatest innovators set out to reinvent the smartphone and found that there just wasn’t that much room for improvement. 
 
 It’s a very different situation from the 2000s, which saw several generations of industry-changing smartphones. Before Android, Rubin created a company called Danger in 1999 that made a smartphone called the Sidekick. It never reached a large market share, but it beloved among techies, and concepts pioneered by Danger later found their way into Android. 
 
 Around the same time, business customers were going wild for the email-focused BlackBerry. It became so ubiquitous that in 2009 President Barack Obama insisted on being given a hardened version of the device for use as president. Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, and Motorola also had early, innovative smartphones. 
 
 Then Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007 and it instantly rendered these non-multitouch phones obsolete. In the past decade, the smartphone industry has largely been a story of other companies trying to catch up to Apple. Today’s smartphones are larger, faster, and have higher-resolution screens than the original iPhone, but they have retained the iPhone’s basic design and user interface. 
 
 In its typically enthusiastic write-up of the Essential Phone, Wired gripes that smartphones have become “as personal as refrigerators.” The phrase was intended as a complaint about the state of smartphone innovation. But it makes more sense to look at the situation the other way around: Refrigerators all look alike because refrigerator manufacturers perfected the basic design of a fridge decades ago. 
 
 Fridge manufacturers have tried every possible combination of features and configurations, and they’ve settled on the designs that do the best job of meeting consumers’ needs. That’s not to say that refrigerator innovation is impossible, but it’s not surprising that refrigerators don’t change very much from year to year. 
 
 Laptops reached the same point more than a decade ago. Apple laptops from the mid-2000s barely look different from today’s laptops. Last year’s introduction of the touch bar was the biggest change we’ve seen in years, and it’s not exactly a revolution. 
 
 And now smartphones, too, seem to have reached a point where there’s little room for further progress. If anyone had the potential to fundamentally rethink the smartphone, it would be Rubin, with his extensive experience of innovation in both hardware and software. 
 
 This isn’t to say that the Essential Phone won’t be successful. It looks like a good phone that could catch on with customers. But the best-case scenario for the Essential Phone is that it becomes one of the better-selling devices in an already crowded Android phone market. Essential doesn’t pose a serious threat to incumbents like Apple, Google, and Samsung the way the iPhone and Android threatened early smartphones. ||||| The Essential Phone, brought to us by the person who created Android, is finally ready for the spotlight. It’s an incredibly audacious and ambitious project, with an outlandish screen and the beginnings of a modular ecosystem. 
 
 First, the Android phone basics: the Essential Phone costs $699 with top-of-the-line specs and features. As you can see above, it prominently features an edge-to-edge display that one-ups even the Samsung Galaxy S8 by bringing it all the way to the the top of the phone, wrapping around the front-facing selfie camera. 
 
 It’s a unique take on a big screen that makes the phone stand out — and it’s smart, too. Often, the status bar at the top of an Android phone doesn’t fill that middle space with icons, so it’s efficient. The screen does leave some bezel at the bottom of the phone, but nevertheless it’s as close to the whole front of a phone being display as I’ve seen. 
 
 Essential is launching the phone in the US to start, and it’s filled the phone with radios that should make it work on all major carriers, alongside usual Android flagship internals like a Qualcomm 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. And because Essential seems to be hanging its hat on the idea of shipping phones without extraneous junk (the designers don’t even put a logo on the exterior), chances seem good that there won’t be a ton of extraneous software laded on to slow the phone down. 
 
 Essential is clearly planning on releasing a very well-made phone: the screen looks promising, it has no annoying logos, and it is built with a combination of titanium and ceramic so it can survive a drop test “without blemish, unlike the aluminum competitor devices.” (Those would be Samsung and Apple, if you’re wondering.) 
 
 But nice hardware isn’t all that hard to come by on Android phones, so the company is aiming to build an ecosystem of accessories. It starts with a magnetic connector and wireless data transfer. Essential will ship a 360-degree camera that can click in to the top of the phone, and the company will also offer a charging dock. Both connect to the phone with small metal pogo pins. They won’t entirely replace USB-C for most people, but Essential is clearly hoping that they could someday. 
 
 Speaking of ports, there is no traditional 3.5mm headphone jack — which is a bummer. We’re told that it will ship with a headphone dongle in the box. It’s possible that other audio accessories could be made that could clip on to the magnetic accessory port. 
 
 The Essential Phone also has a good take on the dual-camera systems we’ve seen on other phones. Rather than use the second lens for telephoto or bokeh, it’s using it for a monochrome sensor, just like Huawei has been doing with the P9 and P10. That second sensor will be able to take in more light than a traditional color camera, meaning it can be combined with the regular 13-megapixel for better low-light shots. The front-facing camera is in line with current expectations, too: an 8-megapixel sensor that can also capture 4K video. 
 
 All that sounds great, but it ignores some key facts in the smartphone space: Apple and Samsung have it pretty locked up right now. The pessimist might say that although this phone looks incredible, it is also likely to break upon the shoals of the phone market, the same rocks that have cracked every Android phone that doesn’t have the Samsung logo emblazoned on it: carrier support, consumer interest, and lack of true differentiation. 
 
 But when it comes to cracking on the rocks, Andy Rubin claims that the Essential phone’s titanium and ceramic build is better able to withstand a drop test. Presumably, Essential’s grander ambitions are equally durable — it’s impossible to look at just this phone outside the context of Essential’s other announcements: the Essential Home speaker and its Ambient OS. 
 
 Even if those ambitions don’t bear out, the Essential Phone itself is exciting on its own. It’s a simple, straightforward Android device that respects the user: it’s powerful, clean, and not entirely beholden to the business whims of the giant companies that currently control the mobile and smart home markets. 
 
 If nothing else, it deserves our attention because it’s coming from Andy Rubin, who knows a thing or two about doing the right thing in the smartphone world. 
 
 Andy Rubin will be onstage tonight at the Code Conference. You can watch it live starting at 6PM PT / 9PM ET. ||||| Essential The creator of Android has finally unveiled the new smartphone he has been working on. 
 
 On Tuesday, Andy Rubin unveiled the first smartphone from Essential, his new company, after months of teasing. 
 
 The PH-1 is an Android device that packs some interesting features and clearly is intended to go head-to-head with the top smartphones from Apple and Samsung. 
 
 The first thing you notice in photos of the high-end device is the screen: It takes up almost the entire front face, going so close to the edge it curves around the selfie camera. 
 
 Another notable feature: It's modular. It has magnetic connectors on the back of the device that let you attach accessories, including a 360-degree camera that can be ordered alongside the phone. 
 
 Speaking of ordering, it costs $749 to reserve it, unlocked and with 128 GB of internal storage, along with the 360-degree camera. For just the phone, it'll cost $699. But unfortunately for international customers, it's available only in the US, to begin with. 
 
 Essential 
 
 Along with that 128 GB of internal storage, it packs 4 GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. 
 
 Its casing is titanium and ceramic, and it comes in four colours — Black Moon (glossy black), Stellar Grey (matte dark gray), Pure White (glossy white), and Ocean Depths (a glossy green with bronze sides). 
 
 The screen is a hefty 5.7 inches — even larger than the 5.5-inch screen on the iPhone 7 Plus — but the relative lack of bezels on it means it has a smaller footprint than you'd expect. The rear camera is 13 megapixels, while the front-facing camera is 8 megapixels. Both shoot 4K video. 
 
 Essential 
 
 All in all, this is a premium device, and an interesting one at that, intended to go after the high-end customers who typically buy the likes of Samsung and Apple devices. (It even compares itself to them directly when showing how its titanium body can withstand a drop test.) The big question is whether it can manage it. ||||| Photo by Stephen Lam/Reuters 
 
 Near the beginning and the end of the keynote address at Apple’s developer conference on Monday, the company showed off a couple of slick corporate branding videos. This isn’t unusual for Apple; every new product comes with a fancy marketing campaign. But to me, these videos seemed to telegraph a new, larger vision for the firm, as ambitious an effort at rebranding as any we’ve seen from the company since the old Think Different campaign. 
 
 Set to text, the videos read a bit like dime store pop-business philosophy, but on screen, they’re a powerful distillation of how Apple thinks about itself. Here’s the company’s new TV spot: 
 
 “Designing something requires focus,” says the on-screen text in a longer, similarly themed Web video. “The first thing we ask is, what do we want people to feel? Delight. Surprise. Love. Connection. Then we craft around our intention. It takes time. There are a thousand nos for every yes. We simplify. We perfect. We start over. Until everything we touch enhances each life it touches. Only then do we sign our work: Designed by Apple in California.” 
 
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 I’m sorry for bombarding you with ad copy, but these clips tell us something important about how Apple solves problems. The company’s heart is in design—when it hits a bump in the road, its instinct is to rejigger how its products look. 
 
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 This instinct forms the back story for iOS 7, the new mobile operating system that Apple unveiled on Monday. The iPhone, the firm’s biggest and most profitable product, has hit a bump in the road. Its growth has slowed, its market share is slipping to Android, and the big features it has introduced over the last few years (Siri, Maps) have been embarrassingly half-baked. There’s also a bigger issue dogging all smartphones, not just the iPhone—they’re not that exciting anymore. Everyone has a phone and they all do pretty much the same things. Gone are the days when Apple could outshine rivals with better hardware—a better display or camera, a faster processor, better battery life. Now all new phones are super fast, they’ve got great displays, their cameras are jaw-dropping, while battery life is—and is destined to remain—just so-so. This is why smartphone screens have gotten so big. With no other way to innovate, companies are just adding extra inches. 
 
 iOS 7—which is available only to Apple developers now, and will make it to your phone this fall—represents a typically Apple-y attempt to solve its smartphone woes. Like the ad says, they started over. They refined, perfected, simplified. They ended up with an operating system that looks very different from today’s iOS but isn’t jarring, one that’s pretty without being flashy. It’s quite nice, if not completely groundbreaking—iOS 7 borrows many ideas from other companies’ touchscreen designs, especially Microsoft. What’s more, Apple’s new design is only a first step in reinvigorating the iPhone’s prospects. To really fight back against Android, Apple will have to do more than just change its aesthetic. It will also have to alter its business strategy. More than anything else, it needs to make a cheaper iPhone, one that potentially cuts down its massive profit margins. To see whether Apple does that—and if it can do so without hurting sales of its flagship phone—we’ve still got to wait a few months. 
 
 In the meantime, if you want to sum up iOS 7 in a word, it would be flat. Last year, CEO Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall, Apple’s former iOS head, and appointed Jonathan Ive, the company’s hardware design chief, to oversee all design at the firm. Everyone has expected Ive to clean up iOS’s rampant ornamentation—the faux textures like stitched leather and green felt, or the buttons with deep shadows that made them look three dimensional—which design snobs had long ridiculed. 
 
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 That’s exactly what Ive has done. If you scan through the gallery of iOS clips that Apple posted on its site, you’ll notice there are no drop-shadows on the buttons and icons—they’re all simple, 2D lines and colors. In the Messages app, your text now appears in bubbles that don’t have a cartoonish inner shadow. In Notes, there’s no longer a yellow legal-paper background. In the Calculator app, every button is spare, dimensionless, just color and text. These may sound like small tweaks, but they combine to make iOS look elegant and grown-up. The design now feels like it belongs on a touchscreen, and it no longer relies on real-world metaphors for meaning. More than that, it looks modern. The old iOS looked like an Applebee’s; the new one looks like an Apple Store. 
 
 Though I was never offended by iOS’s ornamentation, I do prefer the new spare look. But I don’t want to overpraise Apple. For one thing, this flattening is not an original idea. Apple’s rivals have been flattening their operating systems, too, with Microsoft leading the way. A year and a half ago, I called Windows Phone the best designed mobile OS on the market. In many ways, iOS 7’s new design brings it up to par with Windows. In some places iOS 7’s design is a straight rip-off of things that have come before. When switching between open apps, for instance, you now see flip-through cards showing you screenshots of each app. That’s pretty much the same interface that’s in Windows Phone, which in turn borrowed heavily from Palm’s webOS. (“Designed by Apple in California, with an assist from Redmond.”) 
 
 OS design isn’t everything. If it was, I’d have a Windows Phone, and so would you. Apple makes the best-looking phones, and now it has a mobile operating system to match its hardware. As I’ve argued before, the iPhone’s customers never had any real problem with iOS, and I don’t believe the folks choosing Android are doing so because they can’t stand Apple’s too-cutesy interface. Indeed, despite Android’s greater market share, usage stats show that iPhone owners are much more addicted to their devices than Android users, and the iPhone’s customer satisfaction ratings demolish Android’s. ||||| TOKYO/LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO Apple Inc's new iPhone debuted with a splash across the globe, spurring thousands to queue around city blocks and snap up the final gadget unveiled during co-founder Steve Jobs' life. 
 
 Shares of Apple leapt 3 percent to close at a record after people thronged stores in Sydney, Tokyo, London, Paris, New York and San Francisco to get their hands on the iPhone 4S, ignoring criticism about the lack of a design revolution and reports of software glitches. 
 
 Fans in Sydney, Tokyo, Frankfurt and London made sure Jobs, who died last week, remained part of the iPhone 4S launch, with flower, candle and photo shrines erected outside stores. A black-and-white picture of the visionary leader in Covent Garden carried the line: "Let's make a dent in the universe." 
 
 In New York and San Francisco, hundreds showed up as expected but the mood proved more subdued than was typical on an iPhone launch day. 
 
 "I have a lot of respect for how he led the company and so the turnout, and especially the preorder sales, is a mark of appreciation for him," insisted Chris Centers, who was one of the people who has lined up outside the store. 
 
 One of the buyers had also stopped by to lay flowers at the San Francisco store's glass wall in honor of Jobs. 
 
 The new model looks similar to the previous iPhone 4 but has an upgraded camera, faster processor, enhanced security and voice-activated software, which lets users ask the phone questions. The voice software drew glowing reviews. 
 
 Unveiled just a day before Jobs died, it was initially dubbed a disappointment, partly because it looked identical to its predecessor. But anticipation of the "Siri" voice software helped it set an online record in orders on October 7. 
 
 Rivals' woes may have provided a boost. Research in Motion struggled for days to fix an international outage of its email and messaging services. 
 
 Also, about one in four people who thronged Apple stores from Tokyo to San Francisco told Reuters they were ditching BlackBerries, discarding Nokias or even giving up Google Android-based phones, hoping for something better. 
 
 Apple CEO Tim Cook and his executive team hope the first device sold without Jobs at Apple's helm will protect the company against a growing challenge from the likes of arch-rival Samsung Electronics. 
 
 Analysts believe the South Korean company, which powers its phones with Google's Android software, surpassed Apple as the world's biggest smartphone vendor in terms of unit sales in the third quarter. 
 
 Apple does not release sales on launch day, so gauging initial figures is difficult. However, the company took more than 1 million online orders in the first 24 hours after the release of the iPhone 4S, exceeding the 600,000 for the iPhone 4, which was sold in fewer countries initially. 
 
 Sprint -- joining Verizon and AT&T; in Apple's roster for the first time -- said on Friday it had chalked up a launch-day sales record for any device -- by around noon. 
 
 Jobs "made everything better and the products he released were thought through in such detail," Duncan Hoare, a foreign exchange trader, said as a loud roar greeted the opening of an Apple store in London. "It was about the beauty of something and the simplicity." 
 
 GLITCHES? 
 
 The iPhone -- seen as the gold standard for smartphones -- is Apple's highest-margin product and accounts for 40 percent of its annual revenue. The newest iteration uses chips from Qualcomm Inc, Toshiba and a host of smaller semiconductor companies, according to repair firm iFixit, which cracked the device open on Thursday. 
 
 Despite the enthusiasm at stores, Friday's launch was marred somewhat by widespread complaints on the Internet this week about problems downloading iOS 5, the latest version of Apple's mobile software. 
 
 There were also problems with iCloud, Apple's online communications, media storage and backup service formally launched on Wednesday; users reported glitches such as losing their email access. 
 
 Queues in Paris were smaller than those normally seen for a brand-new iPhone, with some fans there wondering if the somewhat underwhelming introduction had put people off. But in London and elsewhere the lines were as long as ever. 
 
 "Despite the initial disappointment that this wasn't an iPhone 5, the reality is we're still seeing the usual frenzy that we've got used to on launch day," analyst Ben Wood at CCS Insight told Reuters. Analysts expect global sales of a few million phones on the first weekend, he added. 
 
 Analysts point to several factors in Apple's favor, including a $199 price that matches up well with rival devices, and availability promised on more than 100 carriers by the end of 2011, far more than its predecessors. 
 
 Underscoring the enthusiasm for the new phone, Japanese mobile carrier Softbank Corp had to temporarily stop contract applications after its computer system was overwhelmed with more requests than it had expected. 
 
 Some analysts expect fourth-quarter iPhone shipments to reach 30 million or more, almost twice as many as a year ago. 
 
 "I am a fan, a big fan. I want something to remember Steve Jobs by," said Haruko Shiraishi, waiting patiently with her Yorkshire terrier Miu Miu at the end of an eight-block queue in Tokyo's smart Ginza shopping district. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Michael Perry in SYDNEY, Edwin Chan in LOS ANGELES, Isabel Reynolds in TOKYO, Marie Mawad in PARIS, Jens Hack in MUNICH, Christoph Steitz in FRANKFURT, Giles Elgood, Matt Cowan, Kate Holton and Georgina Prodhan in LONDON, Supantha Mukherjee in NEW YORK, and Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; Editing by Mark Bendeich, Alex Richardson, Sophie Walker and John Wallace)
– The man who created the Android operating system unveiled a brand new smartphone Tuesday to compete with Apple and Samsung, Business Insider reports. Andy Rubin's Essential Phone—Essential is his new company—will sell for $699 and only in the US to start. It has a massive screen that takes up nearly the entire front of the phone, wrapping around the selfie camera. It has a larger screen than the iPhone 7 Plus, 128GB of internal storage, and magnetic connectors to attach accessories. Here's what you need to know: Wired, which has more on Rubin's journey from Android to Essential, calls the Essential Phone (it has no branding) the "anti-iPhone." Rubin believes Apple no longer has the ability to create devices that seem brand new; Essential can take that mantle. But if that's the case, Vox would have to classify the Essential Phone a failure: "One of the smartphone industry’s greatest innovators set out to reinvent the smartphone and found that there just wasn’t that much room for improvement." Rubin promises to do a few things different with the Essential Phone than Apple does with the iPhone, namely staying away from "planned obsolescence" and not forcing customers to have stuff on their phone they don't want, Recode reports. Phone Arena compares the Essential Phone to its top competitors, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, the LG G6, and the Apple iPhone 7 Plus. The Essential Phone "looks incredible"—and it promises to be more durable than its competition because it's made of ceramic and titanium instead of aluminum—but there's little reason to believe it will have better luck than any other phone not made by Samsung or Apple, according to the Verge. CNET reports the Essential Phone also has a few drawbacks, such as its lack of headphone jack and water resistance.