Essential Phone Now Supported By All Four Major Carriers (Including Verizon) (theverge.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:
Essential's debut smartphone has received approval to run on Verizon, meaning it's now supported by all four major US carriers. Sprint was the device's launch partner, so it of course had support, and both AT&T and T-Mobile gave tacit support ahead of the phone's launch. But Verizon, for some reason, said it couldn't guarantee that the Essential Phone would work and that the phone still had to clear a certification process. Evidently it's now done that, with Essential tweeting out this morning that the phone is now compatible with Verizon.
I wanted to get an essential phone (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hey 2003 called and wanted its corded headphones back.
Apparently they were all tangled so it needed a new set.
You must be REALLY happy your cassette Walkman still has a wired headphone jack.
You're an idoit...
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You can get good audio on iOS (Score:2)
AptX is inferior ro headphones solutions that support AAC directly [pcmag.com].
The AirPods of course already support this but if you prefer a different style it's not like there are not a lot of choices.
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Decent wireless headphones are expensive. Everything I've tried under 200 dollars is pure shit for music. A 10 dollar set of wired earphones is better and if I lose them I wont cry about it. If you've got money to throw away then sure, go wireless.
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Nor apparently is a micro sd slot. Nice otherwise. I'll give it pass
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The Essential Phone will get a clip-on headphone jack
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/14/16309196/essential-phone-headphone-jack-module-announced
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Also missing a removable battery, SD slot, and IR-blaster. What the hell is the deal with removing useful hardware features from high end phones but leaving some of them in lower end phones?
Trump likes this phone too! (Score:1)
Oof, tough break! Now if you have this phone, you are a sexist racist xenophobic Trump supporter! Ouch!!!
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Trump supports it? Well then, I'm NOT buying.
Re:The What Phone? (Score:4, Informative)
Checking out their FAQ [essential.com], they are a slight improvement on Android phones in that their mission is supposedly to 'play well w/ others' and actually belong to you. However, they do lack expandable storage (although their main storage of 128GB may well be adequate), dual SIMs and replaceable batteries. However, their bootloader can be unlocked.
One major beef I have w/ Android phones is that since Marshmallow, I haven't seen a single Android phone that comes w/ SD card - precisely b'cos Marshmallow allows one to get around a limited storage by putting in, say, a 128GB or more SD card and defining it as the primary storage.
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My wife's phone got destroyed. I pulled the 128GB micro SD card and popped it in her new phone. Instant and painless. Sure she could have backed it up but the two phones before somehow she lost most of her stuff when they choked. This time she was happy.
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The above 2 responses describe why SD cards are useful, even if your phone has 256GB. In case something happens to it, it's easier to move it to another phone and just reconfigure it from there. While there may be phones w/ 128GB of storage, the free cloud storage one gets is usually limited: 15GB for Google, and 5GB for Apple. With the latter, one has to regularly back up on a PC or Mac if the content exceeds 5GB.
There is a lot to be said for not having to reconfigure a phone from scratch just b'cos o
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no.
really. no.
whats funny though is that us carriers still "clear" the phones.. ?? come on. if they're conforming to the standards there is no need for that.
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More precisely, a CDMA thing.
Simple reason: all places in the US don't have 4G coverage, so in those areas, a Verizon phone would have to have a fallback to a 3G/2.5G/2G, whichever is available. So if one wants a phone to be passed by Verizon, not only must it work on their 4G band, but it must also work in the previous generation bands. So it goes through its paces in testing, and once Verizon is satisfied, it qualifies it and then offers it in its stores.
Reason it's not an issue w/ GSM carriers is t
Essencially meh (Score:5, Informative)
The phone looks good, but let's recap:
- no headphone jack;
- "premium" materials that makes the phone more expensive, harder but more brittle, and heavier without good reason other than aesthetics;
- no SD card reader;
- very bad initial costumer support;
- delays and broken promises;
- "stock" Android that's not really stock - it has almost no difference from vanilla Android (apart from the 360 camera software), but in truth Essencial is still a middleman between Android updates and the non-skin they have there.
- flagship price for the first phone of the brand that, predictably, already had several bumps on release - wonky camera, os/software not customized to deal with the selfie camera bump, some fingerprint reader weirdness...
People should just wait for Essencial Phone 2 or whatever comes next if Andy Rubin keeps going. Unfortunately, there isn't a single thing that makes this phone unique or essencial in any sense. Not the price, not specs, not new features, not camera, not software. The phones that are coming out with Android One deserves far more to be called essencial.
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Hey, if you want to dress as Batman to use your phone that's your call but I don't think support for people wearing costumes is very high on anybody's list...
Been using mine on VZN for a few weeks (Score:2)
The "trick" was to feed the VZN sales critter an IMEI number from an already supported phone that had a nanoSIM in it. I've been using ATT and VZN interchangeably since I got it.
Carrier aproved phone? (Score:1)
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This was my thought, too.
Why does the phone company get to say "phone X cannot connect to my network; phone Y is welcome"? Surely if both phones are approved by the regulatory body, they should both be permitted to connect.
I moved away from the US back in 2012, and I seem to remember that while I was there I ran into some weird contracts with conditions like "you can only use a smartphone on our network if you sign up to a $60 a month data contract"...
I had no problem running my Nokia XM5800 on Cingul
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Carriers in the United States are required to support e911 customer-location reporting. With the switch to LTE, this means you cannot do tower-based aGPS location to satisfy this reporting. All VoLTE implementations are VoIP stacks that need external pieces to handle geolocation for emergency services.
As a result, only phones with a carrier-compatible VoLTE stack are able to function to e911 requirements. Carriers have been using this to lock out "uncertified" devices -- the argument being that "your pho
4 major carriers? (Score:2)
I thought they were: China Mobile, Vodafone (ww), Airtel and América Móvil [wikipedia.org].