Essential, the smartphone company that was linked to Android’s founder, Andy Rubin is shutting down.
“Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shut down Essential,” the company said on their blog.
The company is known for the Essential PH-1 which was the first phone we saw with a notch and had pretty high end specs. However, it was not initially reviewed well and didn’t sell as much as the wanted.
The company says that thanks to the company shutting down, the February 3rd security update for the PH-1 will be its last. The phone will continue to work but will not receive any additional updates or customer support.
This is a sad ending to a company that roared into the limelight in 2017 with the PH-1 that offered vanilla Android, a titanium body and an impressive software update support system for a 3 year old phone. The Essential PH-1 received Android 10 on January 6th this year which shows how great they were with software updates.
However, we have been waiting for a new phone from the company for a long time now. In October, they announced Project GEM which was a weird concept phone that looked like a remote with a screen. They didn’t divulge more details about the phone and it seems now we will never get to see it.
This brings a sad ending to a company that had a great flawed phone and even a more problematic founder who left Google due to accusations of sexual misconduct.
