Essential announced today that the PH-1 and its 360 Camera (as well as other Essential accessories) are now available in new countries. These include Canada, France, Japan and the UK. The Essential PH-1 was only available in the US, until this update today from the company. Essential says that it is seeing high demand for its smartphone in many countries and is looking to make sure as many customers as possible can get their hands on the smartphone.
The Essential PH-1 was announced last summer, as the company’s first smartphone. Essential was founded by the founder of Android, Andy Rubin. So as expected, it did garner a lot of attention. The Essential PH-1 does sport a 5.7-inch QHD display, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Essential does not offer a micro SD card slot in the PH-1, but you do get 128GB of storage here, so that should be enough to keep most users happy, and keep most of their apps, games, music and pictures on the phone without any issues. Essential has updated the PH-1 to run on Android Oreo, so it is running the latest version of Android right now. Which is definitely important, especially since Essential does use a stock version of Android and has very little apps pre-installed, in fact there are even less apps pre-installed than on a Pixel 2 smartphone, which is pretty impressive.
Essential notes that those in Canada, France, Japan and the UK will be able to purchase the Essential PH-1 and its accessories through Essential’s website. There’s no word on whether or not it’ll be coming to other retailers, like Amazon yet, but for now, it’s just Essential’s website. So if you’ve been looking to get your hands on an Essential PH-1 that is being sold officially in your country, now is definitely the time to do so. Unfortunately, the limited edition colors are now sold out, so only the black and white colors will be available in these new countries.