The Essential Phone had a lot of hype around it when it was first announced. But after a series of delays and some not-so-good initial reviews, the handset failed to sell particularly well.

At release, the Essential Phone was retailing for $699, but you can now pick one up for $499 via Essential’s website. That’s a pretty hefty price cut, which makes the handset almost as cheap as the OnePlus 5.

It is pretty common for Android phone makers to get aggressive with their handset pricing once a handset has been out for a while, but a price cut of this magnitude is pretty much unprecedented in the mobile space.

Essential is now pushing the Essential Phone hard with dedicated TV campaigns that champion the handset’s many USPs. Essential has now fixed the many issues that plagued the phone’s camera at launch.

The Essential Phone’s camera is still no way near as good as the shooter on the Pixel 2 or Galaxy S8, but with a price drop like this things start to look a little bit different – I mean, $200 less is a lot of money.

“We think making it easier for people to get their hands on our first products is a better way to get to know us,” said Essential on its blog.

The Essential Phone is also scheduled to land in the UK during Q4. Whether we’ll see these new prices here, however, remains to be seen.

Personally, a price cut like this should open the floodgates for the company’s popularity. Charging $499 for an unknown phone is definitely going to attract more attention than going after existing iPhone and Samsung fans at the same price point.

Consumers DO NOT Care About Andy Rubin 

This price cut essentially transforms the Essential Phone, it makes it extremely attractive and will likely give the handset the shot in the arm it requires.

The phone itself has A LOT going for it; it looks amazing – it is easily one of the best-looking phones around – it has great specs, and, for the most part, solid performance, especially now the camera has been fixed.

I think a lot of people were wary about the Essential Phone because it was an unknown – an expensive unknown. The company, rightly or wrongly, assumed that it could get by simply by association with Andy Rubin. And that just wasn’t the case.

Most people don’t have a clue who Andy Rubin is, so why would they buy a phone just because it was his company. The man is a very influential person in the tech space, and his one of the main reasons why we now have Android, but for 99.9% of people, this is not really a concern.

I think Essential’s marketing people are now waking up to this fact. They’ve realised that people don’t care that this phone was created by the father of Android, which is why the handset is now being offered at a dramatically cheaper price point.

Had Essential done this from the beginning, I think the handset would have done A LOT better. OnePlus showed the world you don’t need to spend billions to grow a brand, so long as your USP is on point.

Essential, rather arrogantly, believed it could enter the space and take on established players like Apple and Samsung – two companies that have spent BILLIONS building their brands over the space of a decade or more.