Essential Phone

» see essential.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the essential phone was a united states launch at the carrier layer, and that is most of why it never reached me. in 2017 i was in turkey, and the ph-1 went out as a sprint exclusive in america, with an unlocked version that technically shipped worldwide but practically did not turn up on a shelf near me. i read the reviews. i did not know anyone who held one.

the backstory is bigger than the phone. essential was andy rubin's company. rubin co-created android, sold it to google, ran it there for years, then left and in 2015 started essential to build the phone he thought google had stopped bothering to make. when the ph-1 arrived in august 2017 it reviewed well. the body was titanium and ceramic instead of glass that shatters, and the front had a tiny camera notch a year before half the industry copied the idea.

almost nobody bought it. for whatever reason, estimates put first-year sales in the tens of thousands, a rounding error against samsung or apple. the price got cut fast, from 699 down to 499 and lower. and then there was rubin himself. in late 2018 the new york times reported the circumstances of his google exit, including a large payout tied to a misconduct claim he denied, and that story followed the company around. a hardware startup can survive being small. it has a harder time surviving when the founder becomes the headline.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the ph-1 landed as a phone for people who read phone reviews, which is a small market. its best ideas were real. the near-bezel-less front with the camera poking into the screen became the default look of every phone within two years, except apple and samsung got the credit for it. the magnetic accessory connector on the back, meant to snap on a 360 camera or a charger, was the kind of modular idea that sounds great and that almost no accessories ever got made for.

~ what got buried with it ~

on february 3 2020 essential pushed one last security update to the ph-1. nine days later, on february 12, the company announced it was shutting down. buried with it was project gem, a tall skinny phone built around a more voice-driven, ai-assisted way of using a device, which essential had teased and which never shipped. the cloud features for the phone went dark. the ph-1 kept working as a phone, but the company behind it was gone before the device was three years old. android's co-founder had built exactly one phone and then stopped.

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