Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone just got a lot more affordable in Canada, as Telus has dropped the price of the phone to $650 CAD outright. Telus is the exclusive carrier for the Essential Phone in Canada and so far it had offered the device at a hefty $1,050 CAD, putting off many prospective customers especially since the smartphone’s price in the United States is down to $499. With the new discount, Telus shaves a notable $400 CAD off the phone’s price tag, making it more appealing. Moreover, Telus is also offering the Essential Phone at $0 down on most plans now, not just on a Premium Plus plan with a two-year contract.
The Essential Phone made its debut earlier this year, aiming to “fix what’s wrong with Android,” which sounded promising considering that it’s backed by Andy Rubin. For those unfamiliar with Rubin’s work, he is the founder of Android Inc., which had since been bought by Google and became the world’s most popular mobile operating system. Setting out to improve the mobile experience on the whole, Rubin most recently founded a new company, Essential, and the Essential Phone is the first smartphone to come out of this new endeavor. The handset has high-end specs and features, a sleek titanium and ceramic build, and minimal bezels around the display. At $1,050 CAD, however, the Essential Phone was a bit too steep in an already crowded and highly competitive smartphone space.
When it comes to specs, the Essential Phone features a 5.71-inch display with a 19:10 aspect ratio and an odd resolution just below QHD, at 2,560 x 1,312 pixels. The smartphone is powered by Qualcomm’s 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 835 chipset, which packs an Adreno 540 GPU, and sports 4GB of RAM and 128GB of native storage space. Other specs include two 13-megapixel rear cameras, an 8-megapixel selfie cam, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, a USB Type-C port for charging and data transfers, and a 3,040 mAh battery with fast charging technology. The smartphone launched in several color options, but Telus is offering just the Black Moon avatar at this point. On Telus’ Twitter post about the Essential Phone discount, prospective customers have been asking about the Stellar Gray color option but they have yet to receive a response.