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posted by martyb on Thursday February 13 2020, @11:19PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2020, @12:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2020, @12:00PM (#958761)

    Oh look everyone: ANOTHER deluded pedo homo - YOU, FUCKBOY! STFU you TWISTED abnormal fucking ArseHOLEtechnica reject loser. That bullshit "doubletalk" only TWISTED HOMO PEDOS like YOU might try MAY fool a creep like you (you've done THAT to your LOSER self your entire WASTED life anyhow - no surprise, lol), but it doesn't myself OR anyone else you ABNORMAL DESTESTABLE ABOMINATION.

    I'll NEVER forget when I asked him "I heard talk you are gay on arstechnica" (which I did, he was apparently "making passes" @ young men there) & that utter CREEP tried this line of "smokescreen bullshit":

    "... but I'm married"

    LMAO like THAT "fools anyone" but his deluded crackpot TWISTED self!

    Talk about a "put up job"!

    FACTS - his "wife" is a DRUGGED OUT LOON (which HE himself noted, on every anti-psychotic or anti-depressant there is in his writings online) who lives in iirc, San Diego while HE lives in NYC? Please - talk obvious "cover story" for a crackpot PSYCHO child molester so he could come to the USA & try for citizenship with monies OBVIOUSLY put up by his SATANIC "Synagogue of SATAN" colleague Ken Fisher (punk bitch loser WHIMP too).

    LMAO! Like THAT "fools anyone" but a FUCKUP like himself, lol - plenty of TWISTOS try THAT "little maneuver" to TRY to "appear normal" & it NEVER works - their SHEER ABNORMALITY always shows thru & in Peter Bright's case, it SURELY did & it eventually FUCKED HIM OVER hard & rightfully so.

    So once again, IF he survives JAIL? I doubt he would survive long OUTSIDE once SOMEONE COMES OVER THE QUEENS NY & bashes his UGLY HEAD IN with a baseball bat. That's too good for a CHILD RAPER like him imo... sulfuric acid poured into his ears and eye sockets would be more fitting for an CHILD MOLESTER like him (you probably are one too fuckboy).

    APK

    P.S.=> You are a LOSER motherfucker, no questions asked - a PUNY little CUNT loser JUST LIKE "Peter PEDrO Not too BRIGHT" - I'd like to see a WORM "not man" like YOU saying your SHIT in front of MY FACE since I'd BASH your PEDO FUCKING FACE IN cunt... apk