Subway Refreshing Store Designs With Self-Order Kiosks That Support Apple Pay

Subway today unveiled an all-new “fresh forward” redesign coming to 12 pilot locations at its restaurants throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which includes self-order kiosks in select locations that support checking out via Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. Subway has long supported Apple Pay as a payments option during the traditional check-out process in its restaurants.

The new kiosks will allow customers to browse Subway’s full menu, craft their sandwich order, and then check out with a credit card, debit card, Apple Pay, or Samsung Pay.

There will be a designated food preparation and pick-up area for orders made through the new kiosks, on the Subway mobile app, and with Facebook Messenger’s Subway chatbot. The company said that this will help speed up food preparation time for both digital orders and for customers waiting in the basic check-out line.

Digital: Self-order kiosks in select locations, digital menu boards and, as always, Apple and Samsung Pay options. Guests enjoy a speedy Subway® experience with a separate food preparation area and a designated pre-order pick-up location for kiosk, mobile app, delivery, catering and bot for Messenger orders.

The Subway redesign will also include dining areas with USB charging ports so customers can fuel up their smartphones and tablets while they eat, as well as complimentary Wi-Fi, menu changes, and new decor.

The “fresh forward” Subway design is launching today at the following locations: Tamarac, FL; Orlando, FL (2 locations); Winter Park, FL; Chula Vista, CA; Knoxville, TN; Palmview, TX; Hillsboro, OR; Vancouver, WA; Beauport, QC; Granby, QC; and Manchester, U.K.

Subway said that, “Many elements of the new brand identity will be worldwide by the end of 2017.”

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
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‘Final Fight’ boss Abigail to join ‘Street Fighter V’ roster

The EVO 2017 championship — which is the premier, annual tournament for fighting games — took place this weekend. The event culminated in the Street Fighter V finals, which saw Japanese god Tokido battle through the loser’s bracket with his signature Akuma to defeat American Karin main Punk and take this year’s title. That wasn’t all the crowd had to be hyped about, though, with Capcom using the occasion to reveal the next SFV DLC character and first addition from the Final Fight franchise: Comically oversized brawler Abigail.

The Final Fight series never really took off in the same way Street Fighter did, but it’s not exactly a dead franchise. Interesting characters from the old games, such as Guy, Cody and Rolento, have joined the roster of several Street Fighter titles. Abigail will be the first bruiser of Final Fight origin to appear in SFV, though, which has thus far been populated by returning Street Fighter characters or entirely new ones. Abigail was a non-playable boss in the Final Fight games he appeared in, so this will be his first ever appearance on the character select screen. He’s also the first Canadian combatant to be playable in any Street Fighter title.

Abigail and his Metro City Bay Area stage will be added to SFV on July 25th. He’s the fourth of six new DLC characters dropping as part of the Season 2 roster update, which started with Akuma at the end of last year. SFV hasn’t exactly made the splash Capcom would’ve hoped, but Street Fighter will never not be popular among the competitive fighting game community and eSports fans alike. Adding new and previously unplayable characters, as much as everyone hates DLC, at least keeps the game fresh for casual players, and mixes up the meta for the professional contingent.

Source: Capcom (YouTube)

Play ‘Runescape’ seamlessly between your PC and phone

If you’re an avid player of MMORPG RuneScape, then you should be paying attention to publisher Jagex’s announcement today. The UK-based game developer revealed that RuneScape and Old School RuneScape will be coming to both mobile and tablet devices.

The games will feature fully interoperable play between PC and mobile devices; you can start your game on your computer and pick up seamlessly on your phone or tablet when you have to step away from your desk. Or you can play entirely on your mobile device; if you previously had a saved PC game, but now prefer mobile, you can pick up that computer game and play entirely on your tablet or phone going forward.

Jagex’ Chief Operating Officer Phil Mansell says, “We believe in taking our games to wherever our players want them; recent player surveys showed an overwhelming 90% of active players and 64% of former players telling us of their very high intent to play on mobile.” That’s a high volume of players, especially considering that the ability to play on a phone or tablet might draw former players back to RuneScape. It’s nice to see game developers listening to their audiences and adding features that players will really use.

Introducing Engadget’s 2017 back-to-school guide!

We’re now about midway through summer — ergo, it’s time to rain on your beach party and talk about the upcoming school year. Don’t worry, though: With most US colleges opening their doors in late August, and public grade schools waiting until after Labor Day, you have plenty of time to stock up for the semester if you haven’t begun shopping yet.

For this year’s back-to-school guide, we decided to go in a different direction. Earlier this year we announced that Engadget would mostly focus on three main coverage areas — gear (consumer electronics), gaming and entertainment. So it made sense, then, to organize our back-to-school shopping advice in a similar way. In our guide, which lives here, you’ll find buying advice for products like computers, mobile devices, accessories, apps and home (er, dorm) items.

We also have recommendations for gamers, whether your medium of choice is a laptop, games console or VR headset. Lastly, for the partiers among you (and really, what is college for, if not partying?), we picked our favorite audio and home theater products, as well as a handful of streaming services worth subscribing to.

Happy shopping, and may you enjoy your all-night study sessions, communal bathrooms and jello-shot hangovers as much as you do your new gear.

Source: Engadget’s 2017 Back to School Guide

Apple Celebrates World Emoji Day With an Emoji-Themed Makeover for iTunes Movies

Today, July 17, is celebrated as World Emoji Day thanks to this day being marked on the iOS “calendar” emoji. In celebration, Apple has updated the iTunes Movies storefront with a new emoji-filled carousel that uses the popular smartphone characters to describe recent film releases, as well as older movies.

Some of the films referenced include Kong: Skull Island, Beauty and the Beast, Get Out, Stephen King’s It, Logan, Arrival, and more. The iTunes emoji makeover is simply a visual overhaul of the store with no sale prices appearing on any of the participating films.

Apple often updates the iTunes Movies storefront to coincide with new film releases, most recently offering a LEGO makeover to celebrate the digital release of The LEGO Batman Movie. Earlier in June, a few decade-based film collections were put on sale on iTunes to give users the chance to get bundles of films together at lower prices.

(Thanks, Kenneth!)

Tags: iTunes, emoji
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Sensor-studded Kansas City is like a giant smartphone. Now it just needs apps

Your city is dumb. The potholed streets, coin-operated parking meters, and drafty brick buildings many of us interact with every day haven’t changed much in a century. But it’s finally happening. From Oslo to San Diego, cities across the globe are installing technology to gather data in the hopes of saving money, becoming cleaner, reducing traffic, and improving urban life. In Digital Trends’ Smart Cities series, we’ll examine how smart cities deal with everything from energy management, to disaster preparedness, to public safety, and what it all means for you.

In June 2016, the Department of Transportation dangled a $40 million check in front of urban planners with its Smart City Challenge. The premise: Don’t just tell us about the technology you would install with the money, tell us how it will solve your residents’ problems. Kansas City entered, alongside 78 other cities, with high hopes.

The city wanted “to close the opportunity gap” and “transform the Prospect Corridor, currently riddled with high crime, vacant and abandoned buildings, and pervasive hopelessness, into an area as vibrant as our downtown, with cutting edge public transportation, economic development opportunities, and immense pride,” according to its application.

Kansas City’s made it all the way to the finalist round, along with Denver, Portland, and a handful of other cities. Then Columbus, Ohio took home the prize.

But Kansas City isn’t waiting for another contest to implement its plan. Even without a fat check from the DoT, the city still hopes to widen its digital umbrella to cover these areas, and use technology to turn around some of its most blighted areas.

Fiber of being

For Kansas City, the road to becoming a smart city started with Google Fiber. It was the first city to get the superfast network, back in 2012. “It brought a whole lot of entrepreneurs and tech-oriented folks to Kansas City in order to take advantage of what was at the time the only deployment of gigabit fiber,” Bob Bennett, the city’s chief innovation officer, told Digital Trends.

“We turned the city into a smartphone.”

Not long after, Kansas City began construction on a new streetcar line. Cisco came knocking, wanting to install additional fiber lines along the route — that way, it wouldn’t incur additional construction costs. It could just use the holes that were already there. Cisco partnered with local startup Think Big Partners to create solutions, and the city tapped data analytics company Xaqt to build a traffic and parking platform.

Recently, Google Fiber has cancelled some of the installations it had planned for the city (and delayed starting projects in other cities it had previously announced would get the 1,000 megabits-per-second service). But KC still has plans to turn into a smart city, slowly but surely.

Bennett calls the 2.2 miles along the streetcar line the “smartest 51 blocks in America.” There’s public Wi-Fi, smart LED street lights, and 25 kiosks delivering hyper-local information, such as what events are taking place at Sprint Center. The result was a hyper-connected silo, cut off from the rest of the city. The smart strip is easy to see on the city’s interactive website: columns of gray and green along a stretch of a street, representing occupied and available parking spots.

The three-year second phase of the project is set to begin in a few months. It involves putting similar resources into Prospect Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the eastern part of city, which Bennett said has been chronically under-served. “What our gut feeling tells us is that by expanding first into that part of the city, we’re going to be able to accomplish several things simultaneously,” he said. The area is densely populated, with many in the area on the wrong side of the digital divide. The city hopes to better connect 60,000 residents with services “not in the form of a project that gentrifies it, but instead with 21st-century jobs and 21st-century opportunities, so folks who live there can keep their homes and we can grow that section of our city,” said Bennett.

From data to decisions

Aside from the kiosk and public Wi-Fi, citizens may not yet notice how else the city is becoming smart, thanks to a plethora of installed sensors. These can help alert drivers, via an app, of where to find an available parking spot downtown. Sensors can gather a variety of data, but it’s crucial to have a way to analyze data from other sources as well and turn it into something useful. “We’ve used the analogy quite a bit of, we turned the city into a smartphone,” said Blake Miller of Think Big Partners. “We have the connectivity, we have sensors that collect data, now what are the apps and solutions that can be built on top of that, à la the iTunes store?”

Kansas City Area Development Council

Kansas City Area Development Council

Kansas City Area Development Council

Kansas City Area Development Council

Wi-Fi kiosks and real-time parking maps guide residents and visitors around Kansas City as it tries to become one of the U.S.’s smartest cities. (Photos:  Kansas City Area Development Council)

Just recently, the city started using a street-condition predictor. It found that 77 days after the weather went through a freeze-thaw period, residents would call 311 — Kansas City’s service number, not the band — to report potholes. Knowing when and where a pothole is likely to form means crews can address the problem ahead of time, getting materials ready and diverting traffic if a longer-term fix is needed instead of just a patch. Based on water and electricity usage, the vacant building predictor could be a useful way of figuring out which structures are uninhabited before they start attracting crime and the problem spreads. (Abandoned buildings tend to drive property values down, which can cause nearby homeowners to leave as well.) Baltimore is using a similar model, in partnership with Johns Hopkins University.

“Making cities safer is probably one of the biggest promises that smart cities can have.”

Part of making the city smarter is making buildings and homes smarter, too. Think Big is working on creating smart apartments, and Kansas City Light and Power has a program offering residents free Nest thermostats. Participants agree to sign up for three years and let Nest access their energy usage information. In exchange, they get a free smart thermostat that hopefully saves them money.

As for public safety, data and sensors can only take Kansas City so far before “traditional policing” has to take over, said Bennett: “We’re not going to get to a place where I’ll be able to tell you, like I can with the potholes, that a crime is going to occur at X location at Y time, because quite frankly the data going into that equation are less definitive than what we’re using for the traffic bits.” Instead, the city will use correlations to increase patrols at times and locations where crimes are more likely to occur, based on the data. “There’s a lot of things that can be done around public safety and making cities safer, which I think is probably one of the biggest promises — outside of mobility — that smart cities can have,” said Miller. ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors to triangulate the location of gunfire, could connect with streetlights and video cameras, to help officers get a better sense of what’s going on before they even arrive on the scene. Street lights could also strobe or brighten during an emergency situation, and the kiosks could provide instructions or alerts.

Think Big Partners is also helping other startups and companies take advantage of the data. “Now we’ve turned our focus been just about a year collecting data to creating a developer’s portal, which is the Living Lab,” said Miller. “That can help developers, entrepreneurs, corporations of all kinds not only access the connected infrastructure but also access the data coming off that and other city data, like 311.”

The city and its partners, like Cisco, all see open, accessible data as key to success. “You can start using the APIs we have, the secure but open APIs, that allow ecosystem partners to develop new businesses on top of them,” Munish Khetrapal, managing director of the Smart Cities and IOT division at Cisco, told Digital Trends. “If you now build these applications that allow to manage the city operations better, you’re creating jobs in that city.” He gave an example of a mobile application some developers built on top of Cisco’s platform. It allows citizens to report full trash cans around the city. “They’re gamifying it, so they’re telling the city to have incentives for those citizens who report all of this information, so they don’t have to invest in some of these sensors,” said Khetrapal.

With sensors, cameras, and public Wi-Fi comes privacy concerns. Sprint owns and operates Kansas City’s Wi-Fi, so it takes on the responsibility of keeping it secure. Anyone in the world can look and see what parking spots are occupied, but without getting a view of which car is parked there. “We’re trying to be transparent about what we collect, we just keep it anonymous,” said Bennett.

How smart?

Is Kansas City a smart city? Not yet. Even Bennett says that: “I’ll truly be able to say we’re a smart city when, as a citizen, you can essentially look online and have an idea how that city is performing, not based just on an annual apport but on a dynamic dataset.” To get to that point, more people need to be participating, somewhere between 100,000 to 120,000 people, said Bennett. “Right now I’m at 22,000, so I’m a little bit short.” He envisions a dashboard where residents can get a breakdown of how their tax dollars are being spent, how the city is performing. Everything the city handles — from business licenses to dog licenses to utility bills — can be done via an app. “What we see today as a crisis or an issue will instead be something where the city is proactively solving problems before it becomes something worthy of a 311 comment,” said Bennett.

“Our window for failure is probably still smaller than what an entrepreneur can withstand.”

These initiatives may be cost-saving in the long run, but Kansas City can’t afford to back programs that won’t pan out. “We are unique as a city in that we have been allowed to take risks in the smart city space,” Bennet said, “But our window for failure is probably still smaller than what an entrepreneur can withstand, simply because we don’t have the assets to say, ‘Oh well, we learned something,’ and move on.” It’s one of the reasons Bennett works with and looks closely at other cities that are moving towards becoming smart.

To reach the ambitious plans it’s laid out, the city needs to do more than just collect data. “We’re going to be freakishly cool, but we aren’t going to be smart until we actually start using the data to manage our city and be faster than we were in the past,” Bennett said.

Meizu Pro 7 with secondary display all set to launch on July 26

The Pro 7 will let you take selfies with the rear camera.

Meizu will unveil its next flagship, the Pro 7, on July 26. The highlight of the phone is a secondary at the back that will allow you to take selfies with the rear camera. The secondary screen is a full-color display, with a leak from earlier this month showing off a game running on the secondary display.

Meizu is one of the few manufacturers to license Samsung’s Exynos chipsets, but the Pro 7 will be the first device to be powered by MediaTek’s Helio X30 SoC. The X30 is MediaTek’s first SoC on the 10nm node, featuring two 2.5GHz Cortex A73 cores alongside four 2.2GHz Cortex A53 cores and four 1.90GHz Cortex A53 cores. The phone is also rumored to offer a 5.2-inch Full HD display, dual 12MP camera at the back, and a 16MP shooter up front.

Meizu is rumored to launch a Pro 7 Plus variant alongside the regular version, and it’s possible the Plus model could be powered by the Exynos 8895. The secondary display is certainly interesting, and we’ll know more about what Meizu’s plans for the device next week.

OxygenOS: Top 10 features you need to know

OxygenOS offers plenty of customization options.

OxygenOS is one of the best implementations of Android currently available — it’s on the OnePlus 2, OnePlus 3 & 3T, and OnePlus 5 — with OnePlus adding a few useful features on top of a near-stock user interface. While you may not be able to change entire elements of the UI, there are several customization options available to make the device truly yours.

Note: These features are all available on the latest version of OxygenOS 4.x and up. Older versions of OxygenOS may not support all of these features.

Night Mode

Night Mode activates a blue light filter, which reduces fatigue when viewing the screen at night. The feature debuted last year, but on the OnePlus 5 you can set it to automatically engage from sunset to sunrise, or select a custom time range.

The feature works by altering the color temperature of the display, giving the panel a yellowish tint that eliminates blue hues. While the screen no longer shows accurate colors, it does reduce the strain on your eyes, particularly if you’re interacting with your phone a lot at night.

OxygenOS also allows you to set the intensity of the effect — you can choose to eliminate blue tones completely, or select a setting that doesn’t alter the color temperature of the screen too much.

Reading Mode

Reading Mode is a new feature that was introduced with the OnePlus 5. Like Night Mode, the feature automatically calibrates the color temperature of the display, making it conducive to reading.

Instead of switching to warmer colors, Reading Mode creates a monochrome effect that’s great for reading text. You can activate the mode manually or set it to automatically launch for specific apps. For instance, if you have the Kindle app installed on your OnePlus 5, you can enable Reading Mode to launch automatically whenever you open the app, leaving the rest of the user interface unchanged.

Gestures

OxygenOS offers a range of gestures that make it easier to interact with the phone. The three-finger screenshot gesture, for instance, allows you to take a screenshot just by swiping down anywhere on the screen with three fingers.

You also have double tap to wake the screen, and the ability to control music playback — two-finger swipe down for play/pause and <,> symbols to move forward or back in a playlist.

There’s also the option to launch the camera by drawing an O, and toggle the flashlight with a V gesture. These gestures are predetermined on the OnePlus 3T, but you can customize actions for up to five gestures on the OnePlus 5, including launching an app, opening the front camera, accessing the Shelf, and more.

Launcher customization

The latest iteration of the OnePlus Launcher has a lot of similarities to the Pixel Launcher — you can slide up from anywhere from the lower half of the home screen to access the app drawer.

There are a lot of extras baked in as well. The stock launcher natively supports third-party icon packs, allowing you to choose from hundreds of icon packs on the Play Store and use them without having to switch to another launcher like Nova. You can also change the visual look of the UI with themes — there are three available by default, including a Dark Mode — and switch up the accent colors.

The latest open beta has numerous tweaks to the launcher, including dynamic icons for the calendar and weather, a search history row in the app drawer that lists your five most-recently used apps, ability to see battery information for connected Bluetooth devices, and more.

Status bar

The OnePlus 5 has a toggle that lets you see your network speeds in the status bar. You don’t get to see how much data you’ve consumed in a day, but it is a nerdy feature to have nonetheless.

Talking about the status bar, There’s also the ability to toggle icons. If you’re on a carrier that offers VoLTE but don’t want to see the persistent icon in the status bar, you can now turn it off from the settings. Same goes for NFC, VoWiFi, and other icons.

Navigation buttons

A nifty feature in OxygenOS is the ability to choose between capacitive or on-screen navigation keys. If you’re going with the hardware keys, there’s a toggle to turn off the backlight. The default layout of the buttons is back, home, and recents, but you can switch the back and recents buttons if you’re coming from a Samsung phone and want to have the back button to the left of the home key. The customizations are valid both for the hardware keys as well as the on-screen buttons.

Alongside the ability to change the order of the buttons, you can also assign long press and double tap actions to each button. You can select from a variety of actions, including opening the camera, turning off the screen, opening or closing the notification shade, accessing split-screen mode, and much more.

Tweak the audio

The OnePlus 5 takes full advantage of the Snapdragon 835 chipset, and that includes a Bluetooth 5.0 chip and the aptX HD audio codec. You’ll be able to switch between aptX HD, aptX, and the default SBC codec.

The Qualcomm-owned aptX HD codec is designed to deliver high-res audio over Bluetooth. Launched at the beginning of 2016, aptX HD supports 24-bit/48kHz audio, and while it still uses a lossy compression, you get a higher bandwidth of 576kbps. The standard aptX codec, which was first developed in the 1980s, has a maximum bandwidth of 352kbps.

To get the most out of aptX HD, you’ll need to have a compatible audio product that also features the codec. Right now, that’s a short list — only the LG Tone Platinum, Tone Active+, Audio-Technica’s high-end ATH-DSR9BT, mid-range ATH-DSR7BT, and the $1,000 Beyerdynamic Xelento offer the codec.

While the OnePlus 5 comes with the aptX HD codec, the OnePlus 3 and 3T feature aptX. However, all three phones offer an audio tuner that lets you tweak the equalizer settings according to your tastes.

LED notifications

OxygenOS allows you to customize the LED notification light for various actions. There’s the option to select from eight colors for default notifications, battery full indicator, battery charging, and battery low. You can also select which apps trigger the LED notification light.

As we’re on the subject of notifications, the OnePlus 5 has a new vibration motor that lets you choose from five custom patterns for incoming calls. If nothing else, you should take a look just to see the text labels — the default is dzzz-dzzz, but I prefer mm-mm-mm. You can also adjust the vibration intensity for calls and notifications.

Shelf

Shelf is located to the left of the home screen, and gives you a quick overview of the date, time, and weather information for your current location, along with a list of your frequent contacts and recently-used apps.

There’s the option to add widgets to the Shelf, and you can add or remove modules as needed.

Gaming DND

The OnePlus 5 doesn’t have a Do Not Disturb mode for notifications (you’ll have to manually toggle the Alert Slider every night), but it does have one for when you’re gaming.

It does what you’d expect — activating Gaming Do Not Disturb silences all incoming notifications with the exception of calls and alarms. The mode also locks the capacitive keys, preventing you from exiting a game should you accidentally hit one of the navigation keys. If you don’t want to lock the navigation keys, you can turn off the setting. You can set the mode to launch automatically when a particular app is nothing opened.

Bonus: Quick Pay for India

India is one of the largest markets for OnePlus, and the company built a feature that’s exclusive to local customers. Dubbed Quick Pay, it allows customers to launch directly into Paytm’s payment window with a long press of the home button. The feature works even when the screen is off — launching Paytm as soon as you press and hold the power button.

Paytm is the largest digital wallet service in India, and with digital transactions on the rise, giving customers the ability to quickly access Paytm’s payments page is a nifty addition.

Some of the features in OxygenOS are exclusive to the OnePlus 5 for now, like Reading Mode, ability to choose between aptX and aptX HD Bluetooth audio codec, setting schedules for the blue light filter, and so forth.

However, features that aren’t reliant on hardware should trickle down to older models shortly. The ability to toggle status bar icons, for instance, is available on the OnePlus 3T.

What do you like the most about OxygenOS? Sound off in the comments below.

OnePlus 5

• Complete OnePlus 5 review
• OnePlus 5 specs
• Which OnePlus 5 model should you buy?
• Camera comparison: OnePlus 5 vs. Galaxy S8
• The latest OnePlus 5 news
• Join the discussion in the forums

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OnePlus 3T and OnePlus 3

• OnePlus 3T review: Rekindling a love story
• OnePlus 3T vs. OnePlus 3: What’s the difference?
• OnePlus 3T specs
• Latest OnePlus 3 news
• Discuss OnePlus 3T and 3 in the forums

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Amazon

Latest Street View guide lets you explore the locations behind Game of Thrones

Take a look at the real-world filming locations of Game of Thrones with Street View.

Can’t get enough of Game of Thrones? You can now explore Westeros with Google’s latest Street View guide. The guide details real-world filming locations for
Winterfell (shot in Scotland), the Iron Islands, King’s Landing, Dothraki Sea, Arena of Meereen, and other iconic scenes from the show.

Some of the notable locations include:

• Winterfell – Filmed at Doune Castle in the Stirling district of central Scotland and at Castle Ward in Northern Ireland
• Braavos Iron Bank – Filmed at St. Jacob Cathedral in Sibenik, Croatia
• Citadel Grand Library – Filmed at the Monastery of Sant Pere de Galligants in Girona, Spain
• King’s Landing – Filmed in Dubrovnik, a medieval walled city in Croatia
• House of the Undying—Filmed at Minčeta Tower in Dubrovnik, Croatia
• Dothraki Sea – Filmed in Bardenas Reales, a desert in Northern Spain

To explore all the locations, head to the link below.

Game of Thrones on Street View

Essential Phone reportedly coming to the UK, Europe and Japan

EE among carriers in discussion with Android founder’s company over exclusivity deal.

Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone is looking to spread its reach beyond the United States, according to The Financial Times. The paper reports that Essential wants to bring its phone to the UK, mainland Europe and Japan, and that the company is already in talks with UK carriers including EE around an exclusivvity deal.

Essential’s bezel-less, modular-equipped, stock Android handset will go on sale for $699 in the United States, though there’s no firm release date for the device just yet. In the U.S., Sprint is confirmed to be the exclusive launch partner. The device missed its launch target of June in the States, however today’s FT report quotes Essential COO Niccolo de Masi as saying the release is “iminent.”

High-profile, high-end exclusives are relatively rare in the UK market, with recent exceptions being the Google Pixel on EE, and the OnePlus 3, 3T and 5 on O2. Working with a single, excusive carrier partner has clear benefits for a newcomer like Essential — for one, allowing it to focus its marketing efforts for its inaugural handset with the help of a major player in the local market.

If the U.S. price translates over directly to the UK, Brits can expect to pay around £640-650 (including VAT) for the Essential Phone. That’s flagshup money for sure, putting it in the same price bracket as the HTC U11 and Sony Xperia XZ Premium.

Android fans in the UK will likely welcome the opportunity to buy a genuinely interesting handset — however, the Essential Phone will face strong competition from the likes of Samsung, LG, Google and Apple in the latter half of 2017