In 2003, Andy Rubin and three co-founders began Android Inc., a Silicon Valley startup with the goal of creating a mobile operating system for digital cameras. The next year, after a lack of investment and nearly getting evicted from its Palo Alto, California, offices, Android shifted its focus to mobile phone operating systems shortly before the smartphone revolution got underway.
In 2005, Google acquired Android, bringing all four co-founders on board. Today, less than 15 years after its creation, and less than 10 years after its first commercial mobile OS, the Android platform powers nearly 9 out of every 10 smartphones in operation worldwide.
After changing the smartphone software world with Android and Google, Rubin is now looking to change the hardware world with his newest creation that debuted May 30: the Essential Phone.
To say the least, it's highly unlikely that 9 out of 10 of us in the year 2031 will be carrying Essential Phones. In fact, Rubin and his staff at his Essential Products brand don't even want Essential Phone to make it big immediately.
However, in a premium smartphone market dominated by Apple and Samsung with little in the way of big change for the past few years, there's a desire for new products and innovation. For Rubin, the effective duopoly in today's smartphone market has limited innovation that should be coming to the fore.
"When Apple finds some new technology, they're like, 'Great, can I have 50 million next quarter?' Manufacturers are like, 'No, you can't. We just invented it,'" Rubin told Wired's Seth Pierce.
For its part, the Essential Phone makes some noteworthy advances on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Apple iPhone 7.
Visual features are understandably the first thing people pick up on with a new phone, and the Essential Phone raises the bar, with nearly the entire front of the phone as a 5.6-inch screen, including the screen wrapping around a front-facing camera.
Manufacturing-wise, the phone is made of titanium and ceramic materials. Rubin claims this will make the Essential Phone much more resistant to drops, other accidents and normal wear and tear on a smartphone. Also, at $699, the phone's price is comparable to the latest Galaxy and iPhone editions, and it appears as if the handset is on its way to full functionality with all four major U.S. mobile carriers.
Yet traditional specs and features probably aren't the way to view the Essential Phone.
The Essential Phone also comes with a 360-degree camera that's treated by the phone as simply another internal camera, and not something of a foreign USB device or a Bluetooth-connected device. The camera and a headphone adapter — like the iPhone 7, the Essential Phone won’t have a traditional headphone jack — appear to be the main two accessories that come with the phone.
The Essential Phone comes with a 360-degree camera that's treated by the phone as simply another internal camera. (Image: Essential)
However, Rubin wants to eventually offer a whole line of accessories for Essential Phone that hookup to the magnetic connectors at the bottom of the handset, and according to Pierce, "open source the docking system" on the handset for future accessories made by others.
This "modular" approach to a smartphone is something that's risky for Rubin, because it's been tried and failed several times, most notably — and perhaps curiously in this case — by Google. But those attempts involved a degree of customizing a phone's components like someone would customize a gaming PC. In this case, Rubin is setting out to make more peripheral accessories modular.
Additionally, Rubin has debuted the smart-home hub Essential Home, which aims to bring together all devices in a home through a new, Android-derivative system called Ambient OS. The phone accessories will also work with the home hub device. In essence, Rubin wants the Essential Phone, its accessories, the Essential Home hub and smart-home devices to all be connected in a way.
While Essential Phone will probably never come anywhere close to pulling the sales numbers that iPhones or Galaxy models get, its idea of modularity and smart-home connectivity could bring forward the new innovations smartphone observers have been asking for during the past few years.
