Sprint to be exclusive carrier of 'Essential' phone
NEW YORK—The Essential phone that is the brainchild of Android co-founder Andy Rubin now has an exclusive U.S. carrier — Sprint.
Why Sprint?
“We like to bet where we think the market is going as opposed to where the market was,” Essential President Niccolo de Masi told USA TODAY. “I feel like we are a new brand and a new consumer electronics company and we are partnering with the network of the future.”
Sprint has been making progress in advancing its network but it still trails Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile in subscribers.
De Masi points as well to the friendship Rubin has with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. SoftBank owns 83% of Sprint and Rubin is an advisor to the SoftBank Vision Fund.
The nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier hasn’t announced its own pricing yet. You’ll be able to get the device unlocked on Essential’s website for $699 and for $50 extra, get an accessory 360 camera. It launches sometime in the late summer.
If you want to touch and feel the phone, or quiz a sales person before reaching a buying decision, Sprint outlets will be one place to do it. Best Buy will also carry the phone in the U.S. Most phones are purchased at retail stores in the U.S., says de Masi.
Neither Sprint nor Essential would disclose how long their exclusive partnership in the U.S. will last. But de Masi says the decision to go with just a single carrier in the U.S. was strategic. "It's certainly conscious for us to work with partners that can make an investment in supporting our brand ambitions...(and) it's an approach that obviously Andy Rubin has been very successful with in the past as well as a lot of our management team."
But going it alone, and going it alone with Sprint, is a risky choice that is already inviting lots of doubt on Twitter. "This is a recipe for failure," tweets Business Insider writer Steve Kovach (@SteveKovach.) "I'm having flashbacks to the Palm Pre, and not the good kind. But it is a different era," writes veteran tech journalist Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) of Fast Company. And CNBC's Jon Fortt (@jonfortt) merely tweeted, "umm..."
Sprint is also the sole U.S. carrier for the just launched HTC U11.
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There's more backstory to the Sprint-Essential relationship. SoftBank dropped a planned $100 million investment in Essential, possibly for competitive reasons related to SoftBank’s close relationship with Apple, the Wall Street Journal reported in March. Rubin confirmed the part about the dropped investment during an appearance at the recent Code Conference, but tiptoed around the possible Apple connection.
Meanwhile, there’s been on and off speculation surrounding a possible merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. “We obviously follow the news…so we’re not obviously blind to the possibility," de Masi says, adding that, “We certainly aren’t making decisions on things that we don’t know the timing of nor the probability of. But we would welcome Sprint and the overall SoftBank empire being larger on a global basis.”
For its part, Sprint is planning a “hero launch” around the Essential phone, backed by yet-to-be finalized advertising. “We are planning to make this Essential phone very prominent in our stores and will have a premium space to showcase (it),” says Sprint chief marketing officer Roger Solé.
Though Sprint will be selling the phone, the device will not carry Sprint’s or any other company logo.
Rubin is best known for the Android startup snapped up by Google in 2005, where he stayed into 2014. Since leaving he has been at a tech incubator and a venture investment and design studio firm known as Playground Global out of which Essential emerged. Though CEO of Essential, Rubin is still involved with Playground.
Trying to make significant inroads in a market dominated by Apple and Samsung won't be easy.
During an interview with a small group of journalists during last week’s Wired Business Conference, Rubin weighed in on why the smartphone industry has hit something of a wall in innovation lately, and what makes Essential different.
“I think where there’s this duopoly with two guys owning 40% of the market, this complacency kind of sets in where people are going 'what they’re building is just good enough, I’ll just go to them.’ And that’s the perfect time to start a company like (Essential). In the era when the smartphones were new and everyone was upgrading from their feature phone to their smartphone for the first time, the product cycle was every six months…. Then once everyone who wanted a smartphone got one, we’re in a saturated market, at least in the first world.”
Essential had designed a special magnetic wireless connector for accessories on the phone, which is how the the 360-degree camera attaches. It represents a “pretty good example of the innovation we’re thinking of,” Rubin says. “It’s almost like software updates for hardware.”
Rubin says today’s connectors are “dumb” because they get outdated,” where as the wireless connector he is evangelizing is “the holy grail.”
He adds that the Essential approach differs from the modular path Google intended for its since halted Project Ara modular concept. The idea behind Ara was to remove a core component of the phone like its processor and replace it with a faster one. “We’re not doing that, Rubin says. “You buy a phone, the phone works great as a phone, we’re adding stuff onto it…. That’s modular versus accessory. We’re trying to do right by the consumer where they don’t have to throw away their stuff every time there’s a connector change.”
Rubin also contrasted Essential’s approach from the one Motorola employs with the snap-on Moto Mods accessories that are made for its Moto Z smartphones. Moto Mods add boosted speakers, projectors, batteries and other capabilities to the Moto Z. But Rubin contends that Motorola “painted themselves in a corner" because they can never change the industrial design of their next phone, the reason being that future Mods must fit the same way. "Or they have to trick the consumer into throwing away all their accessories and get all the new ones that fits this new thing.”
In a response emailed to USA TODAY, Motorola said that it is committed to innovating on phones, Moto Mods and experiences. It went on to to say that the Mods interface is not restrictive, that it frees consumers from smartphone constraints, and that it is “committed to supporting Mods for multiple generations.”
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter