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from the now-they-will-sell-non-essentials? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Andy Rubin's smartphone startup, Essential, is finally dead. Today, Essential announced in a blog post that it is closing its doors, saying that since it has "no clear path to deliver" its newest smartphone to customers, the company has "made the difficult decision to cease operations and shut down Essential."
Essential was Andy Rubin's next company after his previous gig at Google, where he lead the development of Android, taking the OS from nothing to the world's most popular operating system. Being "The Father of Android" meant venture capital firms would throw money at him when he left Google to form a new company. That company was Essential, where Andy Rubin jumped full time into smartphone hardware. The company was valued at $1.2 billion before it even sold a single product.
The company canceled a straightforward sequel to the Essential Phone in 2018. By 2019, it was teasing "Project Gem"—a super-skinny smartphone with the form factor of a TV remote, which seemed like it would lack compatibility with most smartphone apps on the market. With today's announcement, the Gem phone is dead, too.
In between canceling products, Essential was a non-stop catastrophe of bad PR. The Essential Phone was delayed from its original launch date, and when the time finally came to take payments and ship the phone, the company botched the launch. Essential sent out a bizarre payment-processing email to some customers asking then to send in their photo IDs over email, then it accidentally CC'd that personal information to several other customers who bought Essential Phones. The move was one of the worst first impressions of all time, and Rubin called the mistake "humiliating" in a blog post.
[...] Newton Mail, an email app Essential bought one year ago, will be shut down April 30. The Essential Phone's February security update is the last OS update the device will receive from Essential, though the company was nice enough to leave some code up on GitHub for the Android hacking community to produce further updates.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Funny) by SomeGuy on Friday February 14 2020, @12:03AM (3 children)
So are we about done with smartphones? I remember back before the iPhone, people only grudgingly put up with cellphones with built in computers/PDAs, they were a business thing. Then Apple came along and suddenly they became a ladies fashion accessory.
There is no place to go now. They are done.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 14 2020, @12:23AM (1 child)
There is plenty more to do with smartphones -- 3D touch interfaces in air for example. If you had bothered to read a few articles, you'd see that Andy Rubin got himself into some #metoo trouble while at Google and was forced out as a result -- and he got a 90M golden parachute on his way out.
He was a fucking dipshit who should have laid low for a few more years until all this #metoo shit blew over, then tried again when technology and R&D were more mature. I mean, Jesus fuck. He got 90M dollars in addition to whatever else he got working there, it's not like he had to start his own venture just to put food on the table. Or if he wanted it that badly then he could have used front people while hiding anonymously in the shadows.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday February 14 2020, @01:03AM
I don't think Andy Rubin put much of his own money into Essential. He managed to raise $350 million in "outside funding" which would be the venture capital crowd.
Pissing the VC's money up against a wall is a good thing, because Essential will have used a lot of that money to pay people, meaning the money is now in the wider economy, where real people are making use of it.
I hope the VC money all came from a bunch of idiot trust-fund babies who are now broke.
Not likely, I know, but a man can dream can't he?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Friday February 14 2020, @01:51AM
I think that smartphones *could* be a good idea. But not as "smartphones." As portable application/data platforms.
Back in the late '90s I was thinking that as computing power and storage capacity increased, in smaller and smaller packages, that we could have a hand-held device that *was* your computer, or at least your *secure* personal data storage.
You'd just slip it in a (standardized) dock wherever you went and there were all your applications and your data, strongly encrypted of course. Cellular radios/networking weren't the important part
What did we get instead? Bloatware, cloud (someone else's servers) storage, "apps" that are nothing more than proprietary interfaces to web pages, poor security and enhanced tracking/advertising/surveillance capitalism.
I suppose that could still happen, but what we've gotten instead has created attitudes (and rightly so) about pocket/hand-sized devices.
More's the pity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr