The Essential Phone has its own version of the magnetic Moto Mods system


Android creator Andy Rubin is returning to the smartphone business with his new Essential Phone, and one of its signature features is a modular accessory system that Rubin and co promise will "keep your phone cord-free, future-proof, and always up-to-date." Featuring a pair of magnetic pins on the back of the device, this so-called Click cordless connector will hook up to Essential’s 360-degree camera and its Essential Phone Dock (pictured below).
Beyond those two publicized accessories, we’re left guessing as to what additional modules Essential might be planning, or how exactly this physical modularity would assist with keeping the phone up to date. Lacking an onboard headphone jack, the Essential Phone would be a great candidate for an audio accessory that bumps up its headphone-powering capabilities while also adding in that universally compatible port. Another company that’s eschewed a headphone jack in its recent designs is Motorola, and it too has opted for a system of modular extras, which it has dubbed Moto Mods.
I’ve made no secret of my skepticism about modular smartphones: good mods take a lot of time and engineering effort to develop, and the mobile industry generally moves too quickly for them to be worthwhile acquisitions. Every company that opts for modularity is, at least implicitly, trying to sell people on the idea of a longer-lived phone through incremental hardware upgrades — which Essential is stating explicitly by calling its phone "future-proof" — but all the evidence so far has been that phone hardware and software both move too fast and people just wind up buying new devices.Essential Phone atop the Essential Phone Dock
Essential’s entire existence is built around bucking existing trends, so it stands to reason that it would try to disrupt the current ways of doing hardware as well. Rubin’s depth of experience and expertise in this field lends a measure of credibility to a project that otherwise seems too ambitious for its own good.
Andy Rubin will be on stage tonight at the Code Conference. You can watch it live starting at 6PM PT / 9PM ET.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Linktree’s free workaround lets you add multiple links to your Instagram bio

Image
Instagram only gives you one opportunity to link to outside resources inside its photo sharing platform. This might not be a problem for a majority of the users, but for those wanting a little more customization and even more options, it leaves much to be desired. Enter  Linktree , a free tool for Instagram designed to improve traffic to your outside link, be it a blog, portfolio, or store. How it works is fairly straightforward. After connecting Linktree to your Instagram profile, you’ll receive a single link to place in your Instagram bio. Once that link in place, you can customize what it’s linked to within your browser, be it a single website, or a collection of sites you’re looking to direct followers to Say you’re a photographer who’s using Instagram as a marketing tool for your wedding photography. Using Linktree, you can direct Instagram followers to your blog, your portfolio site, and even your other social media accounts. Until now, you would’ve been stuck c...
Read more

EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE PIXEL 4, THE MOST-LEAKED PHONE EVER

Image
Google’s  Pixel 3 might have been the  most-leaked phone in history . Long before its unveiling, we knew practically everything about it from unboxing videos, photo comparisons, even a full review of the device. Surely, for the Pixel 4, Google would clamp down on leaks to leave some surprises for its debut on  October 15th , right? Let’s just say, if that was the plan, it didn’t exactly work out. We’ve now seen the Pixel 4 XL from every angle and in three different colors. At least seven different sources have touched this phone, many of them confirming the same specs. We not only know which cameras it’ll have, but also what they may be capable of, including air gestures (go figure). That doesn’t even count information Google has already shared  on purpose. So if you want to know almost everything about the Pixel 4 nearly a month before it’s announced, buckle up. We’ve sifted through all of the rumors and information we can find to compile everything we know —...
Read more

Stable Android 10 starts hitting the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ (Update: Canada)

Image
UPDATE  1 : 2019/12/16 4:35AM PST Previous rollouts UPDATE  2 : 2020/01/06 2:15AM PST Canada Two weeks after the  Galaxy S10 line received its stable One UI 2.0 build , it’s time for the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ to get the latest Android flavor. According to a report by  SamMobile , the two late-2019 Samsung flagships are receiving the Android 10 update in Germany, although the rollout is limited to a small group of beta testers. This stable release follows a  five-round beta testing  that concluded just a couple of days ago. Samsung is rolling out the stable build only to its beta testers in Germany to possibly look out for any major bug. Besides SamMobile, the confirmation also comes from  some Redditors  who got the update in Germany just a few hours back. The same Reddit users also mention that Google Pay remains broken even after installing this final Android 10 firmware, although it wasn’t immediately clear how widespread t...
Read more