We have a new contender in the smartphone space. "Essential" is a new OEM that came seemingly out of nowhere, announced by Andy Rubin a mere nine months ago. Rubin is the co-founder and former CEO of Android Inc., a little company that was snatched up by Google in 2005 and went on to build the world's most popular operating system. Rubin left Google, and Essential is his new startup with ambitions in the smartphone and smart home markets. Amazon, Tencent, and Foxconn have already invested in Essential, and the latest round of funding values the company at more than a billion dollars—and this was before it even shipped a product.

With the launch of the "Essential Phone," we finally have that first product: a high-end, $700 smartphone running the operating system Rubin helped create. The phone more or less leaves Android alone, and, with the backing of hardware manufacturer Foxconn, most of the innovation here is in the hardware.

And boy is this a unique-looking piece of hardware. It's made out of titanium and ceramic, and the Essential Phone takes the brave and interesting design choice to cut a chunk of the screen away to make room for the front-facing camera. It also brings us yet another modular system, which initially has a 360-degree camera as the only accessory. Nothing else out there quite looks or feels like the Essential Phone.

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Essential's bad first impression

While this is a new product from a new company, Andy Rubin's track record with Android lends Essential an air of credibility immediately. There are still a ton of questions about the company, though. What will support be like? Will updates come quickly or not at all?

For Essential, well, things are off to a rocky start. At the Code Conference on May 30, Rubin said the Essential Phone would ship in "30 days or so." The company not only missed this deadline but wasn't even close. The actual first ship date for some phones, August 25, was just a few days shy of three months after Rubin's interview. The shipping period was chaos, too, with customers reporting missed shipping deadlines, cards being charged without shipments, and difficulty contacting customer service.

#essentialphone people are incompetent!! here's what's in my inbox. Most of it is someone's personal data - IDs, addresses, etc. @essential pic.twitter.com/8qkcTPbwPz

— Eugene Bogorad (@Bogorad) August 30, 2017

When it finally came time to ship phones, Essential sent out a bizarre e-mail to some users asking for pictures of their driver's licenses or passports in order to receive the phone. Sending personal information over e-mail is never a good idea, but Essential made things much worse when it accidentally CC'ed several other customers in the ID request e-mail. Customers responded to the e-mail with photos of their ID cards, which sent their personal data out to other random customers in the CC field.

In a blog post on Essential's site, Andy Rubin described the issue: "We made an error in our customer care function that resulted in personal information from approximately 70 customers being shared with a small group of other customers." He apologized for the data leak, calling the incident "humiliating."

This was all a really bad first impression for Essential, and it should give any potential customers pause. Can the phone itself ease some of that bad taste in customers' mouths?