Essential Phone

Spent the morning perusing the site for Essential, the new company from Andy Rubin (previous CEO of Android Inc). The company's mission is admirable - create high class devices with all the craftsmanship you already expect but with an eye on interoperability. Devices should play nicely together and not become technologically obsolete just because. The Why I Started This article from Rubin himself directly states "Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you."

The hardware is a full edge-to-edge screen, really nice camera, vanilla Android with no bloatware and an eye on accessories that are, hopefully, future proofed. Sounds great but there are plenty of dissenting voices that say it fails to solve the one problem all the other phones have, you can't replace any of the parts. If the battery dies, good luck opening it up and putting in a new one because that isn't part of the evolution they have in mind.

It's a bit of an unfair comparison because none of the major phones on the market have replaceable batteries and I'm sure there is a reason for that other than planned obsolescence. Regardless of the gripes, it's nice to have another option out there. Yes, it's still iOS vs Android but at least there's a big player in there that just might have the ability to change the way phones are thought about in terms of their longevity. And that's a good thing.