News + Trends
Essential Gem? Andy Rubin unveils the smartphone's new design
by Dominik Bärlocher
Essential retires: goodbye to the PH-2 and Essential Gem
13.2.2020
Translation: machine translated
The Essential brand is going out of business. After the release of one device and a second ambitious project, the Android co-founder is throwing in the towel. Essential brings with it the demise of Newton Mail. We can only speculate as to the reasons for this withdrawal, but everything suggests that it was "too little, too late".
"Despite our best efforts, we will not be able to deliver Project Gem to our customers. We have taken the project as far as we can," the company writes in what is probably its last blog post.
Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.
With Essential, one of the most innovative and courageous smartphone manufacturers of recent years is leaving the market.
Project Gem: new images show what will never happen
Project Gem should have completely reinvented the smartphone. The first working prototypes were spotted last October, in Essential's vision.
But only one thing remains of that vision: the memory of the launch and the videos that probably should have been released one day. The Essential team have made them public in their farewell message. In them, we see a device that certainly looks impressive, but doesn't offer much that's new.
The Gem project was supposed to completely revolutionise the use of Android with a brand new user interface. The roughly 29:9 aspect ratio should have changed the way apps are used. Or almost. The problem: a video from Essential shows what was planned. It looks exactly like what we already know, but in dark mode. What's more, the keyboard in the video is designed for one-handed, right-handed use.
Also, the camera doesn't grab the attention of fans of the photo scene at all, quite the opposite in fact. It's something that's probably some kind of AI scaling and supposed to quadruple the pixel mass of an image. And that's where it goes wrong: it was with the only phone it had brought to market, the PH-1, that Essential had the biggest shortcomings.
The Essential Gem's voice control is pretty interesting. You could have used the fingerprint scanner on the back as a button giving access to a voice assistant. If you'd sent a message, not only would a transcript of the message have been sent, but also an audio file. As exciting as that might have sounded a few years ago, it doesn't really surprise us any more in the age of Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, for which we don't even need our hands any more and which do more or less the same thing.
An AMOLED screen and a nice paint job would have completed the Gem.
The Gem's problem is obvious: too little, too late. Single-box designs are arriving almost at the same time as foldable phones. So it's not surprising that they're not more successful than that. It's also no coincidence that the company announced its withdrawal just one day after the big announcement of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip.
Essential will still be missing from the market. The brand, founded by Android co-founder Andy Rubin, was an outsider in the market, always making a splash with new ideas, not just because of the modular PH-1 or the Gem. As we've known since 2018, Andy Rubin had to give his resignation to Google because the company considered a sexual harassment claim to be credible and proven. Rubin's golden parachute was worth US$90 million and Google never commented on the accusations against him.
With no objective, a C-level scandal and a device that was behind the curve on technology, Essential was not born under a lucky star.
Farewell gift on Github
When it comes to touch, the PH-1 remains one of the best mobile phones around. No other model feels as good in the hand as it does. On the software side, the PH-1 already had major shortcomings when it was launched. The 'revolutionary' version of Android was none other than Stock Android with lightweight camera software that was later improved. But even that wasn't enough to help the brand break through (article in German).
The PH-1, with its Snapdragon 835 and aperture, is still very popular with hackers and tinkerers. Modders use the PH-1 as a development platform. Essential provides much of its own code to these developers on Github. And the company is set to be even more generous.
For developer fans, a prebuilt of our vendor image and everything else needed to keep hacking on PH-1 will be hosted on our github.
The PH-1 will no longer be updated. The 3 February 2020 update will therefore have been the last. CloudMagic, the producer of the Newton Mail mailing application, is also owned by Essential. Newton Mail will continue to operate until 30 April.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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