So it's Labor Day weekend, which around here mostly means I've been half-watching a phone tracking page refresh itself instead of doing anything productive. Back in late May I put down my deposit on the Essential Phone, the PH-1, which is the first (and so far only) product out of Andy Rubin's new company, Essential Products. If you don't recognize the name, Rubin co-founded Android back when it was a scrappy little startup Google bought in 2005, so there's a decent amount of "let's see what the Android guy does next" energy around this thing.
Short version: it's actually shipping now. Not everyone's, not yet, but the first units went out to early reservation holders on Wednesday, and I've seen a few people post photos of the box already sitting on their desks. Mine has not arrived. The tracking page just says "processing" in that vague way that could mean tomorrow or could mean three more weeks, and I've refreshed it enough times today that I should probably feel embarrassed about it.
Here's what's actually interesting about the phone itself, assuming it shows up before I lose patience and cancel. It's $699, titanium frame, ceramic back panel (which is apparently why the early color options are limited: only the black "Pure" version is actually shipping right now, the white and gray ones got pushed back because ceramic is annoying to manufacture at scale). The screen is edge to edge except for a little notch cut out at the top for the camera, which is a design choice I did not expect to see copied elsewhere quite this fast, but here we are.
And yes, before anyone asks: no headphone jack. It ships with a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter in the box, which is the same move Apple made with the iPhone 7 last year, and I'm still annoyed about it every single time I have to think about which dongle is in which bag. I get the internal-space argument, I really do, but at some point an entire industry deciding to remove a jack that has worked fine since forever starts to feel less like innovation and more like everybody copying the one company that did it first because nobody wants to be the odd one out. Small complaint, I know. I have a drawer full of dongles now. It's fine.
The more genuinely different idea is the magnetic connector on the back (two little pins meant for snap-on accessories), and the first one Essential showed off was a 360-degree camera module. That accessory is not shipping with the phone. It's "coming later," which is the kind of phrase that makes me nervous about any hardware startup's roadmap, because "later" for a first-time hardware company can mean anything from six weeks to never.
Worth saying too: this isn't a phone for everyone. It's Sprint-exclusive if you want a carrier subsidy angle, though you can buy it unlocked straight from essential.com and it'll apparently work on most GSM networks, T-Mobile and AT&T included. No Verizon compatibility at launch, which is going to annoy exactly the people who'd otherwise be most curious about it.
I'll also mention, since it happened this week and it's sitting in the back of my head: Apple sent out invites on Friday for a September 12 event, and the header on the invite is just "Let's meet at our place," which is a pretty obvious hint that they're finally opening up the new theater on the Cupertino campus, the one named after Steve Jobs. I've been half-following the rumor mill on this one same as everyone else — new design, no home button reportedly, face unlock instead of a fingerprint sensor — but I'm not going to speculate much further than that here, because by the time anyone reads this there'll be a hundred other blogs already picking apart every leaked case photo. I'll have opinions once there's an actual phone to have opinions about.
For now I'm just sitting here on a holiday Monday, coffee going cold, hitting refresh on a shipping tracker for a phone made by a startup that's never shipped hardware before, made by a guy who co-founded the operating system running on basically every other phone in my house. There's something a little funny about that. If it shows up this week I'll write up actual impressions instead of secondhand ones. If it doesn't, well, I've waited longer for dumber things.