Essential is a unique case in the smartphone world. It was a startup smartphone company started by one of the founders of Android: Andy Rubin. The company went on to become a unicorn startup: a company whose valuation broke $1 billion even before it made any revenue.
Initial reception of the company’s first phone last summer was mostly positive. The phone’s hardware was uniquely made of a titanium frame with a ceramic back plate. It was also the first company to “notch” the display even before Apple’s infamous ‘screen horns’ on the iPhone X. For the record, Essential’s notch was the least…