when I heard we had a chance to look at this I had to come out of retirement
from behind the camera and check it out this is the essential phone PH2 project
gem I'm not quite sure but when it was announced in 2019 I had to have it and 6
years later it's here in my hands and this moment is better than I ever
could have imagined that's right this is a phone it may look like a remote but on
the front here we have a 5.3 in OLED
screen once it boots on you'll see it is crazy and on the back this weird
iridescent pink it's definitely flashy
but a little bit of a fingerprint magnet uh especially if you have gamer fingers
like me but oh my goodness is this
holdable it's definitely meant for one hand I can't see many people typing with
two but this is the ultimate in
portability in phones I don't know if that makes it usable but you can carry
it with you getting right into design we have our side buttons here of course a
power button and volume rocker nothing
on the top or the left side other than our SIM tray and on the bottom a USBC
Port it does have a earpiece speaker at the top here for talking on calls and it
looks like maybe there's a speaker down at the bottom here but it doesn't have a great like the top it feels solid uh
which does not bode well for good audio but we'll find out soon on the back we
we have our main 12 megapix shooter and
a divot which is where the fingerprint scanner would have gone but it's not
there because this is not actually a real phone it's just a prototype it was
announced in October of 2019 but unfortunately essential shut down in
February of 2020 so this never actually got released so there are things just
missing and though there are a lot on eBay shout out to Asha for sending this
working one they didn't actually get a completed version which I think is a
shame because this is one heck of a
design Essentials always been known for their design I mean they released just
one phone but it was known for its design it was actually the first phone
with a notch which is cool I don't know it was pretty controversial at the time
but I was actually an early adopter and got it on launch Day in Canada because I
thought it was incredible and let me tell you I would have been here for day
one too but this isn't just a crazy look for the sake of being crazy it is very
comfortable in the hand I have meaty hands albeit kind of average size and I
find it pretty comfortable of course reaching up to the top is not amazing
but I mean I'm rocking the OnePlus open right now and it's larger uh and the
corners are even harder to reach so this is not too bad of course you're going to
be using this one-handed most of the time so what is the software like well
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most unique feature is that some of the buttons can actually be swapped around
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video description all right we're in and
this is pretty crazy it looks a little bit like a wind Windows phone like it's
kind of tile based a lot of these don't work so I can't click on them and show
you but when you hold on these apps you can change the sizes to make it larger
smaller or really customize it to look however you want and it's cool I really
like how they use the space on such a thin phone there's no after or anything
like that things just get plopped on your screen you scroll through them which isn't the most convenient but I'll
go through the pain just to have it look cool if someone sits next to on the bus
they're looking another kind of pain point is that since it's never released
it doesn't have Google Play servic so even if this OS did work perfectly a lot
of the apps don't run but we did load a couple things to see how they work
including a different launcher so we have Niagara launcher on here if you
don't know what Niagara launcher is it's just a third party launcher that you can
install on pretty much any phone but on this one it looks pretty slick you can
drag your finger out see all the different apps and launch them through here which is a little bit more
convenient than just kind of searching by scrolling down your home screen it's
pretty impressive how it can adjust to such a weird screen resolution and
talking about that that let's talk about specs of the device there isn't a whole
lot about this online because it never came out but I found an app that'll kind
of tell us everything we need to know like I mentioned this is a 5.3 in Ultra
tall OLED screen it's 2160 by 560 I
don't know what aspect ratio that is but it's a weird one I'm sure and it's 90 HZ
which you can't see but uh it does feel great and powering this we have the AR
Arch 64 revision 14 and the GPU is at
adreno 618 and in this little body is a
1,000 Mah hour or 4.1 wat hour battery I
haven't been using it a ton today I did some setting up beforehand but we're at
67% battery nice thing about a small screen and an OLED you shouldn't need as
big of a battery to last you all day you have 4 gigs of RAM in 64 gigs of storage
and it's running Android 10 which was the latest at the time is it the most
powerful thing not by these day standards but we do have some apps on
here to test out later one weird thing I mentioned before is the name is this the
PH2 or the phone 2 or is it project gem
well it's not even really super clear in the uh Hardware info here it has the
device name as PH2 but then says that the device is the jam uh I guess it was
never really solidified and that's kind of a shame uh it would be great to have
seen what they would have released had they stayed open I know that before they
shut down completely they released a bunch of designs and reders for future
phones including another PH2 and a ph3
and this the project gem so it seems like they had some high Ambitions even
though it ultimately didn't work it all right let's check out the camera I'm
going to pull up the search here and you'll see the keyboard I don't know
what to think of it honestly it's very pretty but I automatically want to start
tilting the phone to have it be like a normal keyboard which this is uh uh not
you're not meant to do that but it really shows that this is supposed to be a one-handed phone because everything's
in reach of your thumb uh so if I search
camera uhhuh uh not bad you can use
Swipe but uh it's a little hard to get used to and it doesn't seem like it's
finalized to give you the most accurate answers unless I really am trying to
type Caterers or Cadets this is
ridiculous I do like the uh kind of iPhone inspired layout but it's really
hard to see what's going on here I haven't mentioned it yet but on the
front is a whole punch camera that's 13 megapixels and this is video from it uh
you know what in the little preview it doesn't look awful I do look maybe a
little bit different uh color than normal but not not too bad the photo
doesn't look awful though remembering that this phone is effectively 5 and A2
years old it's not bad all right so you
can't rotate The View when looking at photos in the photo app but maybe you
can in YouTube uh you know maybe it'll take up this whole screen I don't know I
got to say even getting to the video you can see a lot of different content here
this is convenient but how about a video itself uh that's definitely a way to
watch a video you know you can scroll it'd be convenient for going through the comments ments but can I rotate oh baby
here we go oh yeah that's more like it you can hold it comfortably you're not
covering the content and it looks pretty good it does have hdr10 and hlg support
uh and it's 320 DPI so even though it's tiny it still looks really sharp which
is impressive how does it sound it's super 35 which is very standard for
Cinema that is rough it is only coming out of the earpiece not the bottom at
all so it's very uneven I guess let's see what crab Rave sounds like but I am
not hopeful that this has any sort of Base
whatsoever it could be worse it would be challenging but it could be worse this
is pretty bad but I don't have a butt it really just doesn't sound good and it
doesn't have a headphone jack so you're you're really stuck with it I got to say this thing is light too it feels like an
Apple TV remote or something like that but let's weigh it and see
wow 101 G that compared to the OnePlus
open that I use daily is probably a huge
difference yeah 251 G this is a lot easier to carry and
fits in your pocket way easier look at
this it still might not fit in women's Pockets but it has a better chance as an
in between and iPhone 16 weighs about 170 G so this thing is quite light but
with a shape like this it's the ult timate Doom scroll phone so let's pull
up uh Twitter and see what it actually looks like to scroll your life away oh
yeah this this is life this is sweet you
fit so much info on there and I'm somebody who loves setting their font to
Tiny so it is perfect for me
look I can almost read that LeBron James stat I would show you other social
medias but Google Play services doesn't work and it's rooted so a lot of apps
don't work but what does work is Kindle so if you're a big reader again maybe
this is perfect for you a little small but surprisingly readable you know what
it's not bad but I know why you're here you want me to game on it I've been
playing a lot of batra recently so I had to load it up on here and see if it
works as a card game that requires a bit of vertical space I don't know how it's
going to work since it forces landscape on this phone already the fact that it
somehow adapts to this is so cool oh oh
man this is Tiny
you can see that it is using the whole space but the actual play area clearly
has some boundaries and I don't know if this going to be super
playable here we
go that's right my addiction is fed
batro confirmed works on the project gem
but what about a more vertical game Subway Surfers that's right the game
that you always see on Tik toks while someone's talking on a podcast cast
should be perfect for this I think I've never really played
before Oh baby this is it just enough this is all
you need either way this works
great imagine you're in an Uber and you look and their phone is showing this as
the map that is so
tiny I guess all you need to know is what's in front of you right it should
be fine okay you know what
that's actually pretty good I don't know if this is the map that would have come
on the phone out of the box or if this is a third party app that somehow
adjusted to the screen size but this is
sweet one thing I haven't tried yet is typing horizontally oh I don't think
that's the way to do it I'm guessing the idea is that you would still use this
one-handed cuz otherwise typing two-handed is kind of a
nightmare yeah if you're left-handed though I guess don't buy this phone
overall though I'm very very impressed for a phone that never released or
probably got very far in development this works surprisingly well and as this
new dumb phone Trend kind of surges on with things like the light phone the
daylight computers even the remarkable tablets this could have been a great
Contender for still having a smartphone while having your usage minimized I want
more weird phones I've been an HTC Hero user which had a huge chin I had the
iPhone 10 the day it launched I had the essential phone 1 and and I want this so
badly and if entral could have just held it together a little bit longer I think
they actually could have had a hit on their hands but as it is today it's just
a cool relic of what could have been you know what else is a relic to the past
the Nokia 3210 that line has checked out a while back so why don't you check out
that video and before you go like comment and subscribe and let us know if
we should try to get our hands on more prototypes and weird phones and let us
know what you think would you have gotten this phone I had been waiting for
this forever and I want to know if this is something that you would have considered