Essential is a company founded by Andy Rubin, one of the co-founders of Android. Last year, they released their first phone – the Essential PH-1, which is also one of the most durable smartphones of the year.
Unfortunately, Andy Rubin’s popularity and the Essential Phone’s build quality didn’t help the phone make much sales. An IDC research director has revealed that the company shipped just 88,000 units of the PH-1 in 2017.
. @Arubin's @essential smartphone is still a long way from becoming a successful venture. In 2017, it shipped less than 90K units (first six months after launch) pic.twitter.com/NHVlA2Gjzr
— Francisco Jeronimo (@fjeronimo) February 12, 2018
To be honest, you can’t blame people for not buying the Essential Phone. First, it went on sale later than scheduled and when it did, its $700 price tag didn’t justify the experience users got from it. There were complaints about the camera performance as well as the overall system software.
Essential cut the price to $500 and released a bunch of software updates afterwards. While it made the phone more attractive to purchase, the report shows it didn’t do much to boost sales.
Apart from that, the Essential Phone also had to compete against like the OnePlus 5 and later OnePlus 5T, Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, and phones from Huawei, Apple and Google.
READ MORE: You Can Now Purchase Accessories For The Essential Phone On The Official Site
Essential is still pushing out more updates for the phone and is working on updating it from Nougat to Android 8.1 Oreo. We are also optimistic that Essential will not make the same mistakes when it launches a successor later this year.
