Has anyone taken a look at this phone? Thoughts?

I'm strongly thinking this might be my next device.

I have. Seems like they tried their best to somewhat break the mold and take a fresh approach to phones. Plus, Andy Rubin is involved which is pretty cool (being the father of Android, and all..). It looks pretty unique and I like what they did with the screen going around the camera. The design is totally my style too.

For now, I am waiting to see what Google announces with their upcoming Pixel refresh. I've always been a Nexus user so I can't wait to see what they have in store!

I'm skeptical on the delivery, but thankfully it's a phone the carrier I work at will be carrying, so I'll have plenty of time to get familiar with it before determining a purchase or not.

Yes, rumors point to a 18:9 ratio screen for the next pixel, which should mean edge to edge screen. I'd love to have the S8 screen on a pixel!

It will be awesome for sure! Or at the very least it will knock down the price of the first gen Pixel. xD I'm jealous you get to play with the new phones all day!

Bumping topic, I am actually becoming more and more interested in this phone as time goes on. At first I was waiting for the Pixel 2 to come out, and it did of course, and I thought it looked awesome. However, nearly a grand for a phone seems much better spent elsewhere to me personally.

Enter the Essential Phone. I used to be and still am a lover of the (now-defunct) Nexus line and its very decent specs and moderately low price point. I am rocking the Nexus 5X still and love it to pieces. Once they stopped making the Nexus phones and moved onto Pixel, there was nothing super solid (to me, I know there are tons of options out there) at the same price point. I think that perhaps Essential could fill this gap quite well...at the time of this post, it is sitting at $499 unlocked, off-contract on Amazon. I've even seen it dip down to $449 already on there.

Either way, I'll definitely keep my eyes open on this. :D

Very good alternative to the nexus line for sure. There was some initial hardware bugs, but they've been mostly fixed. The camera leaves a bit to be desired though, if I have to be honest.

Really? Even with having the color and monochrome sensors?

What's the issue, still not good enough in low light or something?

I think the phone looks cool but I heard the camera app was trash and froze up a lot in testing. May have been something fixed in a software update but who knows.

Super bummed, they had this phone for half off on Amazon Prime Day and I missed it. :( $249 when it's normally going for about $499!

We used to sell it, but it's on End-of-Life now :(

Gotta be honest though, not too surprised. Saw a number of problems with the device. I had such high hopes.

What kind of problems are we talking about? Genuinely curious. I hear Essential may be going through some shake ups, but they did also just announce the next peripheral and the first one since the 360 degree camera...it's basically an HD audio adapter. It's cool and all, but more importantly it gives me hope they still have some new products in the pipeline. I hear they may have another one or two they're working on!

Software glitches mainly. We saw quite the number of returns.

That's crazy, cause from what I understand it's basically just running a stock version of Android but with a couple changes to allow for the fancy screen stuff going on near the front-facing camera.