Hear me out here:
The Essential Phone was let down by a LOT of other factors. Camera Quality was the biggest for sure, but also the touch screen could be glitchy and in general not as responsive as it’s peers. Lack of wireless charging, poor marketing, etc…
But…
As far as design goes; how it felt in the hand, the size of it, the build materials (ceramic and titanium), the screen-to-body ratio, the weight, even simply how it felt in the back pocket of your jeans. I have never met it’s equal.
So much so that there is STILL a dedicated group keeping her going through projects like LineageOS and e/OS.
Heck, I still use it as my daily driver (on e/os) and ever time I think I’m going to put my sim-card into something slightly newer because the Essential doesn’t have 5G, I quickly realize that I don’t really need 5G that damn badly after all and I switch back.
Someday, the battery will stop holding a charge for more than a day and a half. Or someday, I’ll drop it and the ultimate failure of the Ceramic back will slap me in the face. And on that day I’ll be sad.
I was legitimately sad when LG left the market. It feels like nowadays, the only company left making “high-end phones at mid-range prices” is Motorola, while every other company is following the Apple/Samsung trend of charging literally whatever they can get away with.
We used to live in a world where a company would make a product “X”, calculate how much it costs to manufacture, factor in a 30 percent profit margin to cover reinvestment into the company, and call that the “price”.
Now, largely thanks to Apple, the “price” is whatever the marketing department can convince people to pay with advertising heavily on FOMO and “coolness”, regardless of the manufacturing cost. It’s a shitty way to do business (in my opinion). LG was one of the last of the good ones sticking to the old ways. Now it’s just Moto.
LG was among the last brands that actually dared to experiment with new stuff. It wasn’t always a hit, but they brought a ton of cool ideas to the table.
I still have the successor to the V10 - the V20 - lying around somewhere, though I’ve “upgraded” to a Samsung XCover 6 Pro since then. The LG got slow as hell and had been rebuilt multiple times anyway.