Trying to break in to the high end of the smartphone market as a newcomer is a mistake. That's Apple and Samsung's territory, and they have the muscle to fight you intensely for it. The Chinese manufacturers have the better idea: start with cheap phones, build a user base, and move up.
In particular, the camera is the ace in the hole that the established players have. People spending $700 on a phone expect a top-notch camera, and from the reviews it sounds like the Essential Phone isn't cutting it. Unfortunately the camera is the main reason why there won't be any Cinderella stories about new high-end phone makers: Apple, Google and Samsung probably have teams of hundreds working on camera software now that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and new companies can't hope to match that.
One could argue that the iPhone is bad at 'openness', but that seems to be a non-factor or at least a negligible factor to at least some very large percentage of consumers.
ecosystem lock-in, not allowing un-vetted apps to run, walled-garden approach to everything. based on comments i see here, some people are mad enough about this to avoid iPhones altogether.
that's where i'd start, if i were trying to launch a smartphone platform today.
And when someone's phone ends up with spyware, bitcoin miners, and they're signed up for 12 different $10/month "premium" SMS text services do you believe they'll be happy to be outside the walled garden?
I consider myself a nerd and I find it amazing that some of my fellow nerds learned absolutely nothing from IE and ActiveX: Users will always click Yes/OK/Install/Please_own_me. Providing an "Allow side-loading" checkbox guarantees these people will get completely and utterly owned. The latest free-to-play game will promise a "Chest of Gems" if they check the checkbox.
Some spyware purveyors and scummy ad networks are even now prompting iOS users to install mobile provisioning profiles and the users willingly tap through multiple prompts to install them despite the scary warnings! These users end up with MITM VPN profiles installed that redirect all traffic or get extra spam email accounts setup.
I enjoy having a gatekeeper that keeps most of the riff-raff out. I haven't always agreed with the decisions but I've never been secretly signed up for a premium SMS plan, had a coin miner installed, had my browsing history or contacts harvested, etc.
i could not possibly be more invested than i am in the apple universe. i've used nothing but macs since 2001. i've never owned a smartphone that didn't have an apple logo on it. i make my living writing ios apps. i am mostly pretty happy with apple's choices.
having said that, i think apple goes too far. they could make things safe for the average grandma while also allowing more latitude for tinkerers. they should allow you to hook up your phone to different backend services other than their own icloud. they should not be trying to take 30 percent from every transaction that happens in ios apps. they should allow you to buy music and movies from places other than their store that works just as seamlessly for the end user, with no friction. and so on.
android, on the other hand, goes too far in the other direction. google is so hands-off that they let device manufacturers get away with murder, at the expense of their users.
there is a happy place in the middle that somebody with deep pockets could occupy, if they wanted to.
One can basically level the same charges against Android, and indeed the entire tech industry for having closed source chips, firmware, baseband etc. It’s unfortunate that we’re all so beholden to corporate behemoths and that we don’t have a totally, top-to-bottom free, open and democratic hardware&software in technology.
These things allow iOS to remain relatively secure for end-users while Android continues to be a wasteland of exploits.
I'd argue I want my phone to be as secure as possible, more so than my laptop, since it is my authenticator for most of my services.
Most end users are satisfied with their iOS devices and don't try and use it as a ssh machine or toolkit. They install Candy Crush and some Google apps at most.
You listed the exact same thing 3 times. And yeah, some people care about this, but most users don't. A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.
> A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.
when the iphone came out, the critics said it was nothing new: not the first phone with a touch screen, not the first phone that could play music, not the first phone that allowed you to browse the web, etc. all true. and also, way too expensive. the people at blackberry watched steve jobs' original keynote and declared that it wasn't even possible! and yet the iphone succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
there is always a market for doing things that seem to have been done before, but getting the details exactly right, for a certain set of users. i think allowing a whole ecosystem to blossom around a phone, provided by many different companies instead of just apple, done with exactly the right amount of curation, is just such an idea.
I consider those to be minor advantages - I want my phone to be as close to an appliance as it can be - those things help it be closer to an appliance.
It is behind in terms of what's possible. It just added wireless charging for example.
The iPhone X may be their solution to that: charge a super premium price to essentially leapfrog to the next generation and thereby keep the volumes low so they can do things that don't yet scale.
'start with cheap, build a user base (and also expertise, people and money flow), and move up' is a common strategy for most of newcomers of any market, the IT history give us IBM mainframes to DEC minis to SUN workstation to IBM personal computers as example.
No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla. This is more what Faraday Future was trying to do - be late to the game and copy, maybe change a few details to try to marginally improve it.
What Tesla did is more like what Apple did - massively expand the "smart phone" segment in the first place.
If you compare the Essential phone to a V30, S8, or Pixel, there's nothing anything near the difference of comparing an iPhone to a Nokia N95. Something that is so compelling it makes you not care about the other things the iPhone doesn't have that the Nokia does, like GPS and 3G. Similarly the Model S vs a 7 series: one has more bells and whistles, one is a fundamentally different product that a lot of people not very interested in the old option find much more compelling.
Not initially, no. The all electric drive-train and buying into the future was always the key hook for early adopters. I think a large part of early demand was not because it was the best car for the money, but because it was special, unique, and you believed in Tesla the company and wanted it to succeed.
Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible.
Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money.
The electric drive was the killer feature on the Tesla. Without it the car has no reason to exist.
Also, by luxury car standards the interior of a Tesla is absolutely subpar. They were competing against cars with handcrafted mahogany dashboards and precision stitched leather seats where people will spend hours and days fine tuning the static and moving resistance on the heater control knob to get it just perfect.
That is true, and it works because there is a market for high end vehicles. The market is there because the high end companies make a product that is measurably better than the mass market product from traditional manufacturers.
Such a thing really isn't possible in the cell phone market. A tiny shop can't build a phone notably better than an iPhone or a Galaxy. The only luxury phone provider I know about just glued diamonds on old dumbphones and went out of business.
Essential was apparently banking on people finding the modularity concept to be a killer feature worth a price premium, but that has not been the case apparently.
Has anyone been able to break into the smartphone market lately?
I can't imagine beating Xiaomi, Samsung, Apple and the other big billion dollar conglomerates this late in the game without a significant Nobel prize worthy idea.
I wonder if the name also hurts. When I see the word "Essential" I think "basic/stripped-down". When I see the price of $699 for an "Essential phone", I think that I might as well get an Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, or Google Pixel.
Great point, even though I doubt it hurt. The price self-selects people: Ooopps, apparently no my cup of tea @$900 and back to google search.
The "essential" bracket cannot compete with Chinese low-end phones. Oh well, he'll raise money and do something else. The domain name at least will have some resale value.
It's also at odds with the gadgety stick-on camera. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use an add-on camera lens with their phone, much less the black sweater crowd they seem to be calling out with the "Essential" name.
It's supposed to be a long-term purchase, which is how they will explain low sales volume. But this makes it hard when they'll want to release a better version of the phone. Or not.
Not sure though about their long-term pricing strategy.
The Essential phone does nothing fundamentally new. The Librem 5, on the other hand, will if it gets crowdfunded: it'll be the first phone to not lock its users into the shitty app store paradigm where you rely on the manufacturer for a max of 2-3 years of support/security-updates while renting siloed closed-source programs that sell your usage data and show you ads. The Librem 5 will run regular Linux that keeps working until the hardware falls apart (and then some), that can be updated by anyone, not just the manufacturer, will have its kernel kept up-to-date via efforts of the entire community of Linux kernel developers, and will run applications that aren't rented and that respect their users.
The Librem 5 will have open-source drivers and a non-Android operating system running a mainline Linux kernel (atop which Android compatibility is trivial if folks want to run that).
The copy could state more explicitly that it does work as a regular phone with your number and SIM, but it is explained under the section "A No-Carrier Phone?":
The Librem 5 can be used in any of three ways:
- With a cellular carrier provided phone number, data plan, and WiFi
- With a cellular carrier data plan, and WiFi
- With no carrier, and using only WiFi
WiFi calling and VoIP calling will be able to be provided in WiFi or data plan modes. We expect to offer call-out, and call-in with phone numbers in all of these plans as well. If you still require a “traditional” phone number through a carrier and want to make unencrypted phone calls or messaging, it will be an option you can choose, but is not required (we recommend avoiding unencrypted phone calls).
I gotta say, I agree with that alex dude's reply on the supply being out of touch. The focus is all on the wrong stuff. I've specced out my own phone to build from scratch and these are the requirements I came up with:
Make and receive calls
Send and receive text messages
Wifi hotspot
If you put a goddamn rad camera on it, it would be a winner.
>Will I be able to communicate from my Librem 5 to other phones?
>Yes, you will be able to make regular unencrypted phone calls to any phone number. You will also be able to communicate securely by using the phone dialing application and messaging application, that can run on the Librem 5 phone, Android based phones, and iOS based phones, and any computing device.
If you have trouble with that on your current phone, try https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.mpv which is the Android port of mpv, successor to mplayer/mplayer2 and what I use on every one of my machines to play smooth full-screen video from youtube and everywhere else.
Jesus Christ, HN and the creators of this (ugly, toy-like)phone seem to never get basic, rudimentary supply and demand in action that anybody running a business should already understand. People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone. A million people showing dislike on how the market works won't magically change how it works.
People buy fast, sexy, bleeding edge smartphones with GREAT CAMERAS (not surprised the whole website decided to omit this, it's probably terrible). Companies that make these phones thrive (see: Apple, Samsung, etc. ) while companies that focus on things only a handful of programmers like (for free)wither away into obscurity, see: the Ouya, Firefox OS, opensolaris, etc.
I'm demand, trying to find and coordinate with other demand for the same product in order to ensure that there is a supply. Please don't treat economics as normative when it is, at best, a descriptive science. Please don't shit on me for trying to find other people who have the same ideals and want to see them become reality. It's really discouraging and runs counter to the "anything is possible" spirit of hacking.
There are specific reasons the Ouya and FxOS didn't make sense: an open game-console is already rather quixotic when all the games people want to play are closed-source and open non-games devices exist. FxOS was based on web technologies (huge mistake, given that they're garbage and inefficient), targetted at "emerging markets" (read: poor people, who for some reason are assumed to care less about their phones being slow and not having app compatibility?), and didn't make driver promises. If they had at least gotten calls to happen on a mainline kernel once I would have been convinced, but the real goal of FxOS was market share, not advancing user freedom (where hardware support, not userspace/apps, is the bottleneck). I don't know much about OpenSolaris.
Sure that’s what marketing has taught us to desire but if people were educated about freedoms, rights and scary things like PRISM which we can do nothing about, I think this could be a promising start.
> People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone.
People care but convenience is just more important to bulk of the population. If something comes out that is equally convenient and does not track, people will pick one that does not track. Even Apple plays the privacy card these days for a reason.
>Jesus Christ, HN and the creators of this (ugly, toy-like)phone seem to never get basic, rudimentary supply and demand in action that anybody running a business should already understand.
>People buy fast, sexy, bleeding edge smartphones with GREAT CAMERAS (not surprised the whole website decided to omit this, it's probably terrible). Companies that make these phones thrive (see: Apple, Samsung, etc. ) while companies that focus on things only a handful of programmers like (for free)wither away into obscurity, see: the Ouya, Firefox OS, opensolaris, etc.
The demand side is high enough. The kickstarter already reached 800k USD which is 50% of their funding goal. Remember they are using off the shelf components that have already benefited from economies of scale. Selling a few thousand units is enough for them to turn a profit. If they tried to compete with high end phones like the essential phone does then their needed budget would instantly increase by two or three orders of magnitude but the demand wouldn't increase by the same amount because there are already successful competitors.
I don't really know why you think everything needs to be the best and "disrupt" everything else to be profitable. It's basic economics.
$600 * x (variable revenue) = $1000000 (estimated fixed costs for R&D) + $200 * x (variable costs for components & assembly)
| - $200 * x
$400 * x = $1000000
| / $400
x (variable revenue) = 2500
So I estimate they only need to sell 2500 units or capture 0.00016% of the market. It might be hard but it's certainly doable.
By the way the phone can be plugged into a monitor and keyboard to act as a full linux desktop. That sounds interesting to me even if it didn't focus on privacy and freedom.
Who would buy this thing? The phone doesn't look to be anything special, the name makes it sound low-end, there's zero brand recognition. The magnetic wireless accessory thing is irrelevant to vast majority of consumers, especially since Bluetooth has already solved that problem and works with any device.
I can't imagine a scenario where someone is looking to buy a phone in the ~$700 range and chooses this.
I'm not sure we are talking about the same bluetooth here. I have yet to see a bluetooth device that just works (I am a non apple user, so I can't speak for IOS devices).
The worst example are my wireless headphones. When I get into the car the car radio tries to connect to my phone, so it stops the wireless headphone output. I then have to scroll through the menu and disconnect the car radio, which tries to reconnect after a while.
But that is not even the worst. If I have an audiobook playing while I connect the headphones the audio switches immediately to the headphones as soon as they are connected (which is the expected behavior). But if I start the audiobook after the headphones are connected it takes several minutes until I can actually hear something and I have not figured out a way to speed this up apart from disconnecting and reconnecting after I hit play.
I for one love my wired headsets, they just work. But I have to buy some new ones every other month because I regulary rip them when they get caught up in something.
In the car they are used as a hands free kit. My car radio can be used to do calls as well but the headphones, only in one ear while driving, do have much better call quality
How is that less safe then playing the car's stereo? I have one in my ear at a reasonable volume when driving with others so they don't have to listen to my Geeky podcast or music.
> I have yet to see a bluetooth device that just works (I am a non apple user, so I can't speak for IOS devices).
Indeed, if you go all-in on Apple they really do "just work", and come pretty close when you use a non-Apple BT headset with Apple gear. I can't say if this is because the standards are inadequate and Apple does some extra work, or if the BT implementations on cheap hardware are simply terrible. I kinda lean to the latter, but really either could be true.
> When I get into the car the car radio tries to connect to my phone, so it stops the wireless headphone output.
BTW if you are in California it's a crime to have an earbud in both ears or cup headset covering both ears. You're unlikely to be stopped for that specifically, but if you get stopped for erratic driving, speeding, or have an accident the cops are quite willing to load that one on too, and in the case of an accident your insurance company may not cover you. So your car may have a crappy implementation (see my comment above) or it might be attempting to do the right thing.
Sounds like a data point in favor of the "the standards are inadequate and Apple does some extra work" hypothesis.
Let's hope Apple can feed some of this back into the standards organization.
Apple's efforts with standards committees has historically been so-so -- neither bad nor good, seemingly mostly reflecting the interests of technical managers unless there was a specific strategic need (e.g. USB committee, Qi), and never with a coherent commitment.
> I'm not sure we are talking about the same bluetooth here. I have yet to see a bluetooth device that just works (I am a non apple user, so I can't speak for IOS devices).
I have a 2008 Toyota Tundra pickup with no bluetooth. I bought a $20 bluetooth adapter [1]. It has worked flawlessly with my iPhone 5S/6/7 phones; I step into the vehicle, and as soon as the cigarette power adapters are powered up, it pairs without any intervention on my part (after the initial pairing). I consume vast quantities of Spotify while driving around Central Florida with this setup.
I still rely on the Apple corded headphones, as I prefer their UX to wireless headphones.
It is regretful if it does not work for your specific use case, but it does seem to work in certain scenarios without issue.
I'm just so baffled by this. I've been using bluetooth happily for over a decade. With some minor hiccups, I'd say it works near flawlessly every time. However, everyone seems to hate bt, it never works for anyone, manufacturers put it in everything, people continually switch to bt devices. Nothing adds up.
Yes, you are lucky. My experience with BT is similar to described above - it's unreliable, flaky and prone to random failure. For example, in my car, most of the phones connect most of the time, but at random times they just refuse until the phone is rebooted. Or connect but refuse to dial. Or, alternatively, randomly switch to in-car audio when you stand outside the car and are in mid-call. One of my phones topped it all - connecting it by BT to my car crashes the whole system (thankfully nothing related to actual driving uses the same system, it just makes all audio/radio/maps/etc. unavailable).
For a car, there's not a lot of choice there. For headphones, after trying to find a good BT headset for years and failing, I gave up and got RF wireless set. Seems to work fine so far, but of course requires special gadget and only useable with that gadget.
I hear horrible things about wired headphones too. I think everyone has their own sets of pet peeves that drastically change how they perceive the relative costs and benefits of the available technologies.
I have UE Boom 2 speakers that I use with a wide range of devices (the speaker supports up to 8 registered devices simultaneously). My main mobile devices are not Apples and everything works perfectly.
They are paired with my linux laptop, phone, and desktop computer. Only issue is my car will still try to takeover media on my phone and my car is for phone calls only with bluetooth.
Really? I was going to take the opposite perspective and say celebrity and name recognition goes a long way, irrespective of actual success...
I always hear the "Essential" brand name brought up now whenever Apple, Samsung, etc are mentioned. Even in the non-tech news sites. Which is funny to consider given their sales count.
As someone who frequents many tech sites I can't remember hearing the name "Essential" in relation to phones before today. I don't know what sites you frequent, but they're apparently different than Hacker News, Ars, or even Slashdot.
I recently saw it in NYTimes and two major Canadian papers (Toronto Star and National Post). Each was about the new iPhones and mentioned "Essential" in the context of new pressure from competition (among other brands such as Samsung).
It was mentioned in passing as if it was a known competitor.
Note: I never complain about downvotes, but I'm confused why it's -4, do people think I'm lying? Although my comment is not yet grey, which means they were all newbie members.
I didn't say see it in any particular Tech blogs such as Ars, maybe I should have made that clear...
Selling is hard beyond any specific product criticism. Critics here in HN think it is more related to the product than to the marketing/selling aspects but 5000 are really few units sold.
Value. Early adopters recognize and act on it. This is how OnePlus succeeded with its first phone. No bloatware, great specs, fair price.
Essential is about $250 too expensive. It would have been enough if they had released a cheaper phone with the same specs, branding anonymity, and durability - less the attachments.
The attachment system would be a huge selling point if it gave it the ability to do significant improvements or upgrades to the unit. But so far it appears to be a novelty thing. If they released several addons at launch to show the versatility of the system, then they'd capture the market that wants modular phones. But they didn't.
The specs are nothing spectacular. It's not as great, stats-wise, as my Oneplus 3T, though a titanium body is a better selling point than an aluminium one.
Yes, the Ti body almost had me. Give me this: a Ti body phone with replaceable CPU/Memory. Give me an heirloom quality phone (like the pocketwatch of old) that has strong utility for 5 - 10 years.
Unfortunately modular phones haven't become a thing yet. Google tried that with Ara, but it's in indefinite hiatus.
Of course, the next problem with making phones modular like that is a lack of standards. One developer makes the modules and keeps others from making them, thus entering the walled garden model.
I haven't decided if "journalists" haven't embraced the fact that they're on the web yet or if they're trying not to link off site for SEO juice or just to keep people on their site.
I thought their site was broken. It was just a big black box. I had to scroll down about 50 screens to see stuff, and parts of it were scrolling faster than others and it was just a big mess. Even if I were interested in the product the website is a complete turnoff.
I have higher hopes for their next phone. This first edition was way too basic for my taste. It also showed a lack of experience in dealing with camera.
With the funding they have, I'd rather have them do some sort of acqui-hire over an OEM rather than just hiring a bunch of MBA / former Google employees. They should realize that making a good phone requires years of experience by now.
This is going to be a great budget phone when it's getting cleared out on various sites for $3-400 early to mid next year. At $700 it just can't compete, especially with a mediocre camera, but once it drops under $500 then it'll be a lot cooler than most of the stuff in that price range.
I tried one out, and it's not a hunk of junk in any way... it just doesn't do anything to wow you at that price besides the screen. And it screams "brand that will push one big update if that then quit making phones"
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIn particular, the camera is the ace in the hole that the established players have. People spending $700 on a phone expect a top-notch camera, and from the reviews it sounds like the Essential Phone isn't cutting it. Unfortunately the camera is the main reason why there won't be any Cinderella stories about new high-end phone makers: Apple, Google and Samsung probably have teams of hundreds working on camera software now that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and new companies can't hope to match that.
"PC guys are not just going to walk in here and.."
And yet they did.
How about the phone just sucks? And essential just really has no idea what people want?
What is iPhone bad at? Where's the entry point for a disruptor?
ecosystem lock-in, not allowing un-vetted apps to run, walled-garden approach to everything. based on comments i see here, some people are mad enough about this to avoid iPhones altogether.
that's where i'd start, if i were trying to launch a smartphone platform today.
I consider myself a nerd and I find it amazing that some of my fellow nerds learned absolutely nothing from IE and ActiveX: Users will always click Yes/OK/Install/Please_own_me. Providing an "Allow side-loading" checkbox guarantees these people will get completely and utterly owned. The latest free-to-play game will promise a "Chest of Gems" if they check the checkbox.
Some spyware purveyors and scummy ad networks are even now prompting iOS users to install mobile provisioning profiles and the users willingly tap through multiple prompts to install them despite the scary warnings! These users end up with MITM VPN profiles installed that redirect all traffic or get extra spam email accounts setup.
I enjoy having a gatekeeper that keeps most of the riff-raff out. I haven't always agreed with the decisions but I've never been secretly signed up for a premium SMS plan, had a coin miner installed, had my browsing history or contacts harvested, etc.
having said that, i think apple goes too far. they could make things safe for the average grandma while also allowing more latitude for tinkerers. they should allow you to hook up your phone to different backend services other than their own icloud. they should not be trying to take 30 percent from every transaction that happens in ios apps. they should allow you to buy music and movies from places other than their store that works just as seamlessly for the end user, with no friction. and so on.
android, on the other hand, goes too far in the other direction. google is so hands-off that they let device manufacturers get away with murder, at the expense of their users.
there is a happy place in the middle that somebody with deep pockets could occupy, if they wanted to.
Two things:
- ease of use
- privacy
These two may sell the product even if it lacks certain features.
- ecosystem (as in "do I have an app for that?")
This is essential (pun intended), but Essential is already running Android, so they are covered there.
I'd argue I want my phone to be as secure as possible, more so than my laptop, since it is my authenticator for most of my services.
Most end users are satisfied with their iOS devices and don't try and use it as a ssh machine or toolkit. They install Candy Crush and some Google apps at most.
nope, not at all true, and i already covered many of the details over here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350080
> A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.
when the iphone came out, the critics said it was nothing new: not the first phone with a touch screen, not the first phone that could play music, not the first phone that allowed you to browse the web, etc. all true. and also, way too expensive. the people at blackberry watched steve jobs' original keynote and declared that it wasn't even possible! and yet the iphone succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
there is always a market for doing things that seem to have been done before, but getting the details exactly right, for a certain set of users. i think allowing a whole ecosystem to blossom around a phone, provided by many different companies instead of just apple, done with exactly the right amount of curation, is just such an idea.
The iPhone X may be their solution to that: charge a super premium price to essentially leapfrog to the next generation and thereby keep the volumes low so they can do things that don't yet scale.
What Tesla did is more like what Apple did - massively expand the "smart phone" segment in the first place.
If you compare the Essential phone to a V30, S8, or Pixel, there's nothing anything near the difference of comparing an iPhone to a Nokia N95. Something that is so compelling it makes you not care about the other things the iPhone doesn't have that the Nokia does, like GPS and 3G. Similarly the Model S vs a 7 series: one has more bells and whistles, one is a fundamentally different product that a lot of people not very interested in the old option find much more compelling.
But high end luxury cars were a thing. Tesla wasn't competing with just electric cars, they were competing with all cars.
Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money.
The electric drive was the killer feature on the Tesla. Without it the car has no reason to exist.
Also, by luxury car standards the interior of a Tesla is absolutely subpar. They were competing against cars with handcrafted mahogany dashboards and precision stitched leather seats where people will spend hours and days fine tuning the static and moving resistance on the heater control knob to get it just perfect.
Such a thing really isn't possible in the cell phone market. A tiny shop can't build a phone notably better than an iPhone or a Galaxy. The only luxury phone provider I know about just glued diamonds on old dumbphones and went out of business.
Essential was apparently banking on people finding the modularity concept to be a killer feature worth a price premium, but that has not been the case apparently.
I can't imagine beating Xiaomi, Samsung, Apple and the other big billion dollar conglomerates this late in the game without a significant Nobel prize worthy idea.
The "essential" bracket cannot compete with Chinese low-end phones. Oh well, he'll raise money and do something else. The domain name at least will have some resale value.
We already have good phones by a number of other companies, and some of them actually cost a reasonable amount.
The Librem 5 will have open-source drivers and a non-Android operating system running a mainline Linux kernel (atop which Android compatibility is trivial if folks want to run that).
Lots of HN readers have tech jobs and can afford to make history by crowdfunding: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
The Librem 5 can be used in any of three ways:
- With a cellular carrier provided phone number, data plan, and WiFi
- With a cellular carrier data plan, and WiFi
- With no carrier, and using only WiFi
WiFi calling and VoIP calling will be able to be provided in WiFi or data plan modes. We expect to offer call-out, and call-in with phone numbers in all of these plans as well. If you still require a “traditional” phone number through a carrier and want to make unencrypted phone calls or messaging, it will be an option you can choose, but is not required (we recommend avoiding unencrypted phone calls).
>Yes, you will be able to make regular unencrypted phone calls to any phone number. You will also be able to communicate securely by using the phone dialing application and messaging application, that can run on the Librem 5 phone, Android based phones, and iOS based phones, and any computing device.
The FAQ is at the bottom of the kickstarter.
People buy fast, sexy, bleeding edge smartphones with GREAT CAMERAS (not surprised the whole website decided to omit this, it's probably terrible). Companies that make these phones thrive (see: Apple, Samsung, etc. ) while companies that focus on things only a handful of programmers like (for free)wither away into obscurity, see: the Ouya, Firefox OS, opensolaris, etc.
There are specific reasons the Ouya and FxOS didn't make sense: an open game-console is already rather quixotic when all the games people want to play are closed-source and open non-games devices exist. FxOS was based on web technologies (huge mistake, given that they're garbage and inefficient), targetted at "emerging markets" (read: poor people, who for some reason are assumed to care less about their phones being slow and not having app compatibility?), and didn't make driver promises. If they had at least gotten calls to happen on a mainline kernel once I would have been convinced, but the real goal of FxOS was market share, not advancing user freedom (where hardware support, not userspace/apps, is the bottleneck). I don't know much about OpenSolaris.
> People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone.
People care but convenience is just more important to bulk of the population. If something comes out that is equally convenient and does not track, people will pick one that does not track. Even Apple plays the privacy card these days for a reason.
>People buy fast, sexy, bleeding edge smartphones with GREAT CAMERAS (not surprised the whole website decided to omit this, it's probably terrible). Companies that make these phones thrive (see: Apple, Samsung, etc. ) while companies that focus on things only a handful of programmers like (for free)wither away into obscurity, see: the Ouya, Firefox OS, opensolaris, etc.
The demand side is high enough. The kickstarter already reached 800k USD which is 50% of their funding goal. Remember they are using off the shelf components that have already benefited from economies of scale. Selling a few thousand units is enough for them to turn a profit. If they tried to compete with high end phones like the essential phone does then their needed budget would instantly increase by two or three orders of magnitude but the demand wouldn't increase by the same amount because there are already successful competitors.
I don't really know why you think everything needs to be the best and "disrupt" everything else to be profitable. It's basic economics.
$600 * x (variable revenue) = $1000000 (estimated fixed costs for R&D) + $200 * x (variable costs for components & assembly) | - $200 * x
$400 * x = $1000000 | / $400 x (variable revenue) = 2500
So I estimate they only need to sell 2500 units or capture 0.00016% of the market. It might be hard but it's certainly doable.
By the way the phone can be plugged into a monitor and keyboard to act as a full linux desktop. That sounds interesting to me even if it didn't focus on privacy and freedom.
I can't imagine a scenario where someone is looking to buy a phone in the ~$700 range and chooses this.
The worst example are my wireless headphones. When I get into the car the car radio tries to connect to my phone, so it stops the wireless headphone output. I then have to scroll through the menu and disconnect the car radio, which tries to reconnect after a while.
But that is not even the worst. If I have an audiobook playing while I connect the headphones the audio switches immediately to the headphones as soon as they are connected (which is the expected behavior). But if I start the audiobook after the headphones are connected it takes several minutes until I can actually hear something and I have not figured out a way to speed this up apart from disconnecting and reconnecting after I hit play.
I for one love my wired headsets, they just work. But I have to buy some new ones every other month because I regulary rip them when they get caught up in something.
In the car they are used as a hands free kit. My car radio can be used to do calls as well but the headphones, only in one ear while driving, do have much better call quality
Indeed, if you go all-in on Apple they really do "just work", and come pretty close when you use a non-Apple BT headset with Apple gear. I can't say if this is because the standards are inadequate and Apple does some extra work, or if the BT implementations on cheap hardware are simply terrible. I kinda lean to the latter, but really either could be true.
> When I get into the car the car radio tries to connect to my phone, so it stops the wireless headphone output.
BTW if you are in California it's a crime to have an earbud in both ears or cup headset covering both ears. You're unlikely to be stopped for that specifically, but if you get stopped for erratic driving, speeding, or have an accident the cops are quite willing to load that one on too, and in the case of an accident your insurance company may not cover you. So your car may have a crappy implementation (see my comment above) or it might be attempting to do the right thing.
One of my co-worker got a ticket just for that alone.
I seems to remember it was $400 ticket.
Let's hope Apple can feed some of this back into the standards organization.
Apple's efforts with standards committees has historically been so-so -- neither bad nor good, seemingly mostly reflecting the interests of technical managers unless there was a specific strategic need (e.g. USB committee, Qi), and never with a coherent commitment.
This page mentions it in the "Setting your Airpods up" section.
I have a 2008 Toyota Tundra pickup with no bluetooth. I bought a $20 bluetooth adapter [1]. It has worked flawlessly with my iPhone 5S/6/7 phones; I step into the vehicle, and as soon as the cigarette power adapters are powered up, it pairs without any intervention on my part (after the initial pairing). I consume vast quantities of Spotify while driving around Central Florida with this setup.
I still rely on the Apple corded headphones, as I prefer their UX to wireless headphones.
It is regretful if it does not work for your specific use case, but it does seem to work in certain scenarios without issue.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GJFGE3W/
For a car, there's not a lot of choice there. For headphones, after trying to find a good BT headset for years and failing, I gave up and got RF wireless set. Seems to work fine so far, but of course requires special gadget and only useable with that gadget.
I could unpair them and then pair it again when needed, but I hope that is not how it should be done.
They are paired with my linux laptop, phone, and desktop computer. Only issue is my car will still try to takeover media on my phone and my car is for phone calls only with bluetooth.
Really? I was going to take the opposite perspective and say celebrity and name recognition goes a long way, irrespective of actual success...
I always hear the "Essential" brand name brought up now whenever Apple, Samsung, etc are mentioned. Even in the non-tech news sites. Which is funny to consider given their sales count.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/andy-rubin-promises-...
Not to mention a lot of TV commercials for it.
It was mentioned in passing as if it was a known competitor.
Note: I never complain about downvotes, but I'm confused why it's -4, do people think I'm lying? Although my comment is not yet grey, which means they were all newbie members.
I didn't say see it in any particular Tech blogs such as Ars, maybe I should have made that clear...
Essential is about $250 too expensive. It would have been enough if they had released a cheaper phone with the same specs, branding anonymity, and durability - less the attachments.
Value. Value. Value. This concept is key.
The specs are nothing spectacular. It's not as great, stats-wise, as my Oneplus 3T, though a titanium body is a better selling point than an aluminium one.
With the funding they have, I'd rather have them do some sort of acqui-hire over an OEM rather than just hiring a bunch of MBA / former Google employees. They should realize that making a good phone requires years of experience by now.
(they say a software update will improve the camera, we'll see)
I tried one out, and it's not a hunk of junk in any way... it just doesn't do anything to wow you at that price besides the screen. And it screams "brand that will push one big update if that then quit making phones"