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Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

fiercewireless.com

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Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#61

Post by the_common_man »

alexblumel wrote: post #26
gue5t wrote: post #11

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 wor…

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 bu…

I agree with what you said but...

> 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.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#62

Post by hbbio »

blensor wrote: post #22
jakef wrote: post #14

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 reconnec…

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.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#63

Post by smsm42 »

kentt wrote: post #59
blensor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reconnec…

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.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#64

Post by sadlyNess »

alexashka wrote: post #7

I don't get what problem this phone is solving. I think that's how everyone else feels too. We already have good phones by a number of other companies, and some of them actually cost a reasonable amount.

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.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#65

Post by blensor »

sp332 wrote: post #60
blensor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reconnec…

If you don't want it to connect to your car, why did you pair them?

If I am playing streaming music and have other people in the car who want to listen as well.

I could unpair them and then pair it again when needed, but I hope that is not how it should be done.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#66

Post by jccooper »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #40

https://www.essential.com/ I'm sick of articles about products with no links to the official product site.

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.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#67

Post by s73ver_ »

majormajor wrote: post #46
s73ver_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what Tesla did, though?

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 differe…

"No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla."

But high end luxury cars were a thing. Tesla wasn't competing with just electric cars, they were competing with all cars.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#68

Post by srcmap »

gumby wrote: post #55
blensor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reconnec…

> 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 l…

"earbud in both ears"

One of my co-worker got a ticket just for that alone.

I seems to remember it was $400 ticket.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#69

Post by nsxwolf »

gumby wrote: post #55
blensor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reconnec…

> 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 l…

Apple's Bluetooth products "just work" because they don't use Bluetooth for the pairing part.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#70

Post by metalliqaz »

gue5t wrote: post #19
metalliqaz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can it run smooth full-screen YouTube?

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.

I use the YouTube app.
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