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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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2020, @12:34PM
Your hemorrhoids hurting Peter Bright? Obviously. Leroy Washington's numerous anal penetrations of you have done their dirty work as he "grooms" you for your inevitable AIDS death you so rightfullly have merited you detestable piece of pedophile filth and no amount of Preparation H can't soothe your pain we all enjoy you enduring. Give a shit? You can't even hold your shit after the ass-reamings you've had in jail hahahaha. Grunts and squeals (the latter from you and the former from Leroy with you covered in his sweat due to his exertions and ministrations on you, hehehe) with echo from cold jail cell walls is all we hear out of you. They are your themesong no matter where you go in your now soon to be short life, and there is no escaping it. Enjoy life as a shunned arstechnica loser you all are. Oh the shame of it for you nest of pedophiles.