Essential Phone 2 — How Essential can have a much more successful year two

Essential’s biggest task is to learn from the mistakes of the PH-1.

One of 2017’s most polarizing devices was the Essential Phone. There was a lot of hype for the startup headed by Android father Andy Rubin, and while the Essential Phone’s hardware is still some of the best money can buy, continued software bugs and lackluster camera performance continues to put a damper on what should have been one of last year’s best handsets.

Essential’s confirmed that a successor to the Essential Phone (aka the PH-1) is in the works, and while the company hasn’t shed too much light on what it’ll change or when we can expect it, there are a few key areas that Essential needs to work on if it wants to avoid the various blunders it’s already experienced.

Wider availability

Before Essential starts worrying about new software features or hardware refinements, it needs to focus on expanding to more markets and carriers with the PH-2. The Essential Phone is still limited to just the United States and Canada, and when it comes to carrier support, you’ll only find it on Sprint and Telus, respectively. For a startup trying to break into a well-matured industry, this is not the right move.

If Essential wants to keep pushing its way into North America, it needs to expand to other carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, Rogers, Bell, etc. Average consumers still buy their phones in carrier stores as opposed to going online to purchase it unlocked, and because of this, having a larger presence here will make Essential much more visible to a broader audience as opposed to just Android diehards.

Essential needs to hit North America with full force, expand to other countries, or both.

Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt Essential to also set its sights on other markets entirely. Expanding operations to new countries is an expensive decision, but it’s one I think could benefit the company in the long run.

Take Nokia, for example. During just one year of being run by HMD Global, Nokia-branded Android phones have “been selling already millions of Nokia smartphones” during 2017. HMD Global was just founded in December of 2016, and those “millions of Nokia smartphones” is considerably more impressive than Essential selling less than 90,000 units of the PH-1.

The secret behind HMD Global’s success? Wider market availability. The company sells its Nokia 6 in the U.S. and Canada, but HMD Global more heavily markets its products in China, India, Australia, the UK, and more. These markets are much easier to break into than Canada and the U.S., and if Essential doesn’t have the time and/or resources to focus on North America and more global availability, it should go with the latter before worrying about the former.

Make the PH-1’s software mess a learning lesson

Essential promised a pure, stock software setup with the PH-1, and while it technically delivered on that front, the user experience was almost too barebones at launch. Essential’s slowly added new features as time’s gone on, such as fingerprint sensor gestures, UI themes that changed based on your wallpaper, and more. These have made the Essential Phone feel more complete and well thought-out, and they’re things that need to be present on the PH-2 from day one.

The PH-1’s software was too barebbones for its own good.

Another persistent issue that Essential just recently addressed is jittery scrolling. Users have been reporting laggy/slow scrolling animations on the Essential Phone pretty much since it first came out, and after shelling out $700 for a new phone, running into something like that is a major turn-off. The latest 8.1 update appears to have finally fixed this, however, so once again, Essential’s moving in the right direction.

I don’t think there are a lot of things Essential needs to change on the software side of things with the PH-2, assuming it understands where it went wrong with the PH-1 and applies those fixes/changes for its second go around. Have more software goodies and a fix for bad scrolling present on the PH-2 as soon as it ships, and it’ll make a much better first impression than the PH-1 ever did.

Go back to the drawing board with the camera

And then, of course, there’s the camera.

The camera on the Essential Phone has been bad-mouthed relentlessly since its launch, and I don’t think anyone will have a hard time agreeing with me that this is the biggest user-facing issue that Essential has to tackle for gen two.

To its credit, Essential’s released non-stop software updates to the PH-1 that have all be focused on trying to make the camera as good as can be. Some of these updates have been more successful than others, and as it stands, the Essential Phone’s camera is now fine. It’s not amazing or nearly on the same level as the Pixel 2, but it is far better compared to how it initially performed.

With that said, it’s probably best Essential goes back to the drawing board for the PH-2’s camera. If the company wants to stick with dual-cameras, it needs to find a way to make both sensors truly useful. Then again, it could drop the secondary lens and focus its time on just one that performs really, really well.

Don’t mess with the hardware

Producing a great camera is going to take a lot of time and effort, but thankfully Essential should have plenty of it since nearly everything else about the PH-1’s hardware is still impeccable.

The Essential Phone remains as one of the most attractive and well-built phones on the market, and its use of ceramic and titanium continues to be refreshing in a world of glass and aluminum. I imagine some people would still like to see wireless charging and a 3.5mm headphone jack, but these minor gripes aside, I wouldn’t change much at all with the PH-2’s hardware.

What do you want to see?

Whether you own an Essential Phone or have been viewing things from the outside in like myself, what things are you hoping for the most with the Essential Phone 2? Am I on base or is there something I missed? Sound off in the comments below!

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Huawei P20 leaks in the flesh with display notch and two cameras

Say hello to Shirley.

There are a lot of phones being announced at MWC this week, but that doesn’t stop the leak train from chugging along at full steam. Just about a month before it’s set to be unveiled in Paris, the Huawei P20 has leaked in a completely revealing hands-on photo.

Evan Blass shared the above image on Twitter on February 26, and as you can see, gives us a clear shot of the P20’s front and back.

The front of the P20 appears to adopt the popular 18:9 aspect ratio and a front-facing fingerprint sensor lies beneath three on-screen navigation buttons. Bezels surrounding the display are quite thin, and just like another flagship phone from last year, the P20 has a notch at the top of its display to house its front-facing camera.

Flip the P20 over, and we’re met with a glass back, rounded corners, and two rear cameras. Previous rumors have suggested that the P20 will come equipped with three cameras on the back, but it’s entirely possible that’s a feature that’ll be reserved for the higher-end P20 Plus.

Also worth noting is the “Shirley” branding near the bottom. Huawei often uses fake brand names on its prototypes to help prevent potential leaks, but as you can see here, that hasn’t helped much at all.

Huawei will announce the P20 on March 27 in Paris, France, and now that we’ve got our first look at the phone, are you more or less excited for it?

Huawei P20: Rumors, specs, availability, and more!

Subgrid positioning is the feature that keeps me coming back to Nova Launcher

Double the options, double the home screen possibilities

There are features on most good launchers that keep you coming back. Action Launcher has Quickdrawer. Nova Launcher’s got quite a few features that keep users coming back year after year, theme after theme. Beyond the ridiculous amount of launcher customization, however, Nova has a surprisingly simple ace in the hole.

And that ace is subgrid positioning.

Say you put a 5×1 widget on the top bar of your screen, like a Google Keep widget. It’s nice, but it’s too thin to really let you see much of your notes. Then you stretch it to 5×2, and the widget is nice and readable, but it’s now covering 40% of your home screen. You want your widget to be somewhere in between.

Google Keep widget on a 5×5 grid at 5×1, 5×2, and 5×1.5 size

With subgrid positioning, you can resize and place items at .5 increments on your home screen grid, letting you split the difference and resize the widget to be 5×1.5. It seems like a simple thing, but it essentially doubles your options when resizing a widget or placing a shortcut. On a 5×5 grid, instead of having 5 width or height options, you have 10, and when scaling and placing widgets, those options can make all the difference in the world.

How do you turn on this wonderful setting?

Open Nova Settings.

Tap Desktop.

Tap Desktop grid.

Tap Subgrid Positioning to enable it.

It’s amazing the difference one toggle hidden in one setting screen can make, but subgrid positioning makes more themes and layouts possible than most other mainstream launchers, and that flexibility is hard to give up. Have you used subgrid positioning yet? If so, how hard is it to go back to anything else? If not, what are you waiting for?

Read more: Everything you need to know about Nova Launcher

Updated February 2018: This article has been cleaned, renewed, and given updated links!

Get the party started with the $60 UE Wonderboom Bluetooth Speaker

Connect wirelessly to this compact Wonderboom speaker from up to 100 feet away.

UE’s Wonderboom portable Bluetooth speaker is now on sale at Amazon for just $59.99 in your choice of six different colors. At just 50 cents above its lowest price ever, today is a perfect day to make this speaker your own. It also marks a $19 drop from its average price.

While compact, the Wonderboom speaker blasts sound out 360 degrees which helps kick up any party. It’s waterproof and can last for up to ten hours on a single charge, and its Bluetooth can connect from up to 100 feet away from your device. What’s cool about Wonderboom speakers is that two of them can be connected together for even bigger sound.

This speaker features a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon with over 430 reviews.

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Where to find the best Playstation Plus deals

Stock up now.

PlayStation Plus subscriptions normally start at $17.99 for a three-month membership and go up to $59.99 for a year of access. Being that you can purchase and stack multiple years of subscriptions at once, odds are that you won’t want to pay full price for each year.

With this subscription, you gain access to online gameplay, exclusive discounts, and even a selection of free games each month to download and play. Whether you want to just be able to play some games online with friends, or you want to unlock the full potential of your PlayStation 4, having PlayStation Plus is a must.

Luckily, these cards go on sale throughout the year. The discounts seem to vary, but most of the time we see discounts on the annual card. If you’re looking to pad your PlayStation Plus subscription with a few discounted months or years, here are the best deals to check out.

• Sony offers a free 14-day trial
• Best Buy has a 3-month card for $17.99
• CDKeys has a 12-month card for $57.99

These deals change regularly, so be sure to check back for future updates on cards and stock up when you find a great deal.

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• PS4 vs. PS4 Slim vs. PS4 Pro: Which should you buy?
• PlayStation VR Review
• Playing PS4 games through your phone is awesome

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Watch Samsung’s Galaxy S9 launch in under 11 minutes!

And just like that, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 has arrived. Today, at MWC 2018, the company introduced its new flagship handset with the slogan “The camera. Reimagined.” While the bulk of improvements to the Galaxy S9, over the S8, are imaging-focused, there are also new features like AR Emojis — Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Animojis. You can watch a recap of the Unpacked 2018 event here, where you’ll also learn more about the updated DeX desktop experience, which now uses the S9 as a trackpad.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

What does Fitbit need to succeed?

Fitbit is the current king of wearables, but for how much longer? The company has recorded four successive quarters of losses since the tail end of 2016, and that’s a problem. Fitbit will publish its latest earnings results later today, and those numbers won’t just tell us how the company is faring, but also how the wearables industry is doing as a whole.

Since 2007, Fitbit has sold more than 70 million devices, from its early, belt-worn pedometers to the wrist-worn activity trackers that made its name. It’s a brand that is synonymous with the wearables market, despite also selling headphones and smart scales. But the numbers suggest that the huge sales successes of 2015 and 2016 are not going to be repeated.

“The Apple Watch has undoubtedly put pressure on Fitbit,” explained George Jijiashvili, CCS Insight’s wearables industry analyst. Unfortunately, Fitbit famously struggled to build a full-featured smartwatch, with the Ionic making its debut in late 2017. Engadget’s Cherlynn Low said that the device’s “smartwatch-like features are either limited in functionality or require tedious, time-consuming setup,” though she did praise the watch’s “comprehensive tools” and “long-lasting battery life.”

The Ionic’s long gestation enabled others to steal Fitbit’s lead at the high end, with Apple being a clear beneficiary. Sales of the Apple Watch are believed to have surpassed those of the entire Swiss watch industry for the 2017 holiday season. CCS’ latest report claims that “Apple has become the market leader,” while Canalys believes that the Apple Watch “accounts for 51.6 percent of all smartwatches ever shipped.”

Fitbit can console itself knowing that it remains a big deal in the fitness market, but that position is under threat. CCS believes that just two companies, Fitbit and Huami, account for 80 percent of the global activity tracker business. But Huami, the Chinese company that designed the Xiaomi MiBand, has now edged ahead in the market, thanks to its “enormous home market advantage in China.” But even that battle may not be worth fighting for long, since the report believes that the tracker industry has shrunk by 18 percent. IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo agrees, saying that the “growth is now all in smartwatches” rather than simpler, cheaper fitness trackers.

Which is a shame, because Fitbit was arguably the best hope for a compelling alternative to Apple becoming a de facto smartwatch monopoly. Those who would suggest Google as a worthy opponent forget that the company has paddled around in circles. It doesn’t publish figures on how many Android Wear smartwatches have been sold, but — judging by downloads of the Android Wear app — it only broke the 10 million sales threshold over the holidays.

There is a hope that Fitbit’s Ionic will help satisfy demand from a legion of consumers who have been holding out for a Fitbit-branded smartwatch. That may not be justified. During the 2017 holidays, investment bank Morgan Stanley found that boxes of the watch were piled up at retailers. When Fitbit publishes its figures, the most important number will be the volume of devices that it sold across 2017. “Fitbit shipped 21 and 23 million units in 2015 and 2016,” says Jijiashvili, but he expects the 2017 total to be 14 million trackers and just one million smartwatches.

IDC’s Jeronimo is more optimistic about Fitbit’s sales, believing that the Ionic is likely to be “one of the 10 best-selling wearable devices of 2017.” He says that’s going to be a big achievement, especially since the watch only launched in October.

Separate from the volume of devices that Fitbit has sold (or shipped) will be the amount of money it’s been able to bring through the door. The company reported revenues of $574 million in the last three months of 2016, and it needs to do significantly better to avoid more red ink on its spreadsheets. Fitbit does, at least, appear to understand that its dominance in the consumer wearables market is under threat, and that it can’t beat Apple at hardware alone. This explains its hard turn into the healthcare market, where its relatively affordable trackers can undercut more expensive medical devices.

The company purchased Twine Health, a startup that created a platform for managing chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. It also invested cash in Sano, a company that is building a very small blood glucose monitor for continuously monitoring diabetic blood sugar. “It’s a risky strategy,” says Jijiashvili, since the healthcare market is so fraught with necessary regulations to protect patients. Then again, the analyst believes that “it is a necessary move,” since the consumer wearables “space continues to shrink.”

Jeronimo is, again, more optimistic, saying that a move toward the healthcare business is a “good way forward.” He feels that a Fitbit is a better alternative than a bulky, medical-grade tracker for patients with heart conditions or those who need to lose weight. The crucial element, however, is to win the trust of the medical community and also to ensure that it can survive making the transition away from being a purely consumer-focused brand. Jeronimo also believes that Fitbit needs to make more of the data it collects from users, so that its devices can warn you that something is going wrong. But even here, the analyst admits that Apple also has its sights on doing this, and its flagship product has “far more functionality.”

In many ways, Fitbit’s struggles mirror those of GoPro, another brand that has found sustained success hard to come by. Both quickly rose to prominence by essentially defining a relatively niche category — fitness trackers and action cameras — that went mainstream at the right time. And both have suffered from the issues of serving that niche too well, and also being undercut by their competitors. A $149.95 Fitbit Alta HR has to compete with Xiaomi’s MiBand 2, which does almost everything the pricier unit does for less than $40. Jijiashvili feels that Fitbit has to be hoping that “its foray into adjacent products is more successful than GoPro’s efforts with drones.”

Not everyone believes that the company is doomed. Fitbit investor and writer George Kesarios is firmly behind the company. Last November, he wrote an article in finance journal Seeking Alpha that said he believes “that this company has turned a page, and things will be different from now on.” Kesarios’ belief is based on the increase in Fitbit’s revenue, even though that increase is not enough to cover its losses. He adds that he believes that the Ionic will “be the product that will sell year after year, like Apple’s iPhone.” But his opinion is a minority amid the tide of folks who are increasingly pessimistic about Fitbit’s long-term health.

If the wearables industry — as we understand it today — is to succeed and grow, then it needs Fitbit to remain as a viable wearable alternative to Apple. But if Fitbit can’t turn a profit during the launch of its first smartwatch, during a holiday season, no less, then it’s hard to imagine a future.

Qualcomm open to Broadcom merger for the right price

Qualcomm has long rebuffed a merger with rival chipmaker Broadcom, but now it looks like the two companies may be closer to a deal. Today, Qualcomm’s Chairman of the Board Paul E. Jacobs sent a letter to Broadcom’s CEO, Hock Tan. In it, Jacobs outlined that the bulk of Qualcomm’s issues have been addressed, but the companies are still too far apart on pricing. Broadcom’s current offer is $79 per share (it was previously $82 per share), but Qualcomm’s board believes that severely undervalues the company.

If the two companies can come to an agreement on price per share, then Broadcom’s takeover of Qualcomm looks like it could actually happen. Qualcomm’s shares have been lagging behind Broadcom’s for years, and Broadcom has expressed interest in its rival for some time. Not to mention that Qualcomm’s shareholders are fatigued with its patent licensing business, which has provoked the ire of companies like Apple. The company hasn’t shown a lot of interest in investor returns.

That’s not to say it would be a done deal if the two companies come to a pricing agreement, though. The merger of these two large chipmakers would definitely attract the interest of regulators, and those discussions could drag on for quite awhile. And beyond antitrust implications, the potential deal could have a huge impact on the consumer landscape for chips. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Source: Bloomberg, PR Newswire

Watch Sony’s Xperia XZ2 launch in under 10 minutes!

Sony phones have had a consistent look for years now — and we’ve never been sure if that’s a good thing. It seems like Sony might agree, too, as the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact are some of it’s most distinct phones to date. That date is today, for the record, as Sony took to the stage (or, rather, it’s booth here at MWC) to reveal them to the world. Catch up on the best bits of the event right here.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

Airfox’s mobile wallet aims to replace banks in emerging countries

Mobile wallet applications aren’t anything novel, but most of the existing ones (like Venmo or Square Cash) all have something in common: they require people to have a bank account or a debit/credit card to use them. That’s where Airfox differentiates itself. The app is geared toward “unbanked” users in emerging markets who may not have a credit history, due to lack of resources or because they’re generally not fans of banks. Part of how Airfox plans to succeed is by adopting services that are already offered in certain countries. Like in Brazil, for example, which is the first place the app’s launching. There, users can put money in the app through a “Boleto,” a popular paper-based payment method that can be loaded by depositing cash in ATMs.

The benefit to digitalizing these Boletos, which the app verifies by scanning their barcodes, is that people are able to have all their funds in a single app and use those to transfer money to friends or family — so long as they’re also on Airfox. But that’s not it. Users can also pay their utility bills within the app and, in the future, they’ll have the chance to refill public transportation cards. Although Airfox making use of Brazil’s Boletos system is specific to that country, you get the idea of how it could be utilized in other emerging markets down the road.

Airfox also wants to entice people to engage with the app often by rewarding them with cryptocurrency. Later on, there will be video advertisements in the application that users can watch if they want to earn some crypto, which they can then turn into traditional money and add it to their balance. The company says it’s also going to offer micro loans, with the amount of money that can be offered and interest rates set to be based on how the app’s algorithms view an individual’s trustworthiness. Airfox says people can build up their score simply by using the app on a daily basis, as it’ll keep track of your activity and know if you’re depositing money often or paying bills on time.

Since this is aimed at people in emerging markets, Airfox doesn’t plan to launch an iPhone app soon, as it notes that its target demographic leans more toward Android handsets. All in all, Airfox says its goal is to be cheaper and generally more accessible than traditional financial services, and it hopes to expand all these features beyond Brazil in the near future — though it doesn’t see coming to the US soon, since there are more banking regulations there than in most countries around the world.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.