Former Google executive director Andy Rubin ’s smartphone startup , Essential Products , is formally done after years of circling the drainage .
The fellowship announced Wednesday in ablog postthat it was shutting down operations , and that theProject GEM smartphone conceptEssential announced last fall “ had no clear path ” to becoming a consumer twist .
Will anyone neglect it ? believably not .

Essential founder Andy Rubin was reportedly ousted from Google due to sexual harassment allegations.Photo: Getty Images
Essential was a buzzy hardware society back in 2017 when it relinquish its first ( and only ) smartphone , thePH-1 . The phone had some issues , particularly when it came to the television camera software , but update over clock time ( and a steep cost bead ) made the PH-1 more likeable over time . No one bought the phone , but investor and tech manufacture insiders were excited to see what Rubin , considered the creator of Android , would do next . Rubin invoke $ 300 million to fund his efforts .
But then theNew York Timesreported in 2018 that Rubin ’s departure from Google , which reportedly gave him a $ 90 million payout , was due to believable intimate actus reus allegations . Rubin denied the study , but the fizzling interest in Essential speed .
The startup attempt to retake its early plug last October when Rubin tweeted persona of a new speech sound with a “ radically dissimilar form factor , ” which seem like a smartphone vertically sliced in one-half . Project GEM , as the phone was called , sparked some sake due to its figure and vertically orient substance abuser user interface , but mostly just made people inquire why Rubin was still trying to make Essential a thing .

Essential was a company built around Rubin ’s repute . After all , he spearheaded a peregrine operating system that is now used on 80 % of the world ’s smartphones . But Essential ’s only product was mostly not dandy in an incredibly competitive market , and its founder turned out to be profoundly flawed at good and complete codswallop at worst . That ’s not a sustainable byplay modeling . And now it is no long .
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