Android’s co-founder Andy Rubin’s company Essential shut its shop down in 2020. The brand quit the smartphone market with only one device under its belt called the Essential PH-1. Notably, the company had a couple of phones including the Essential PH-2 and PH-3 in the pipeline in 2019. In addition, another device from the brand known as the “Gem” was in the works the same year.
Notably, Rubin shared a handful of photos of the Essential Gem in 2019. The official photos showed a radically different device with a super tall form factor. Now, a hands-on video of the prototype of the unreleased Essential Gem smartphone has surfaced.
The Essential Gem phone’s hands-on video shows a radically different device than the PH-1
Rob Wainwright, a software engineer at Nova Launcher, recently purchased the Essential Gem’s prototype through eBay. The engineer went on to share some details about the phone online. He posted a hands-on video of the Essential Gem, showing its unique tiles-based interface and design from all angles.
The Essential Gem prototype shown in the video has a radically different form factor than the PH-1. The device looks more like a touchscreen-based remote control rather than a smartphone. There’s a punch-hole in the screen to house the selfie camera. At the rear, the phone has a large camera module and a fingerprint sensor below it. The fingerprint sensor of the prototype isn’t working in the hands-on video.
There are tiles for different applications on the main screen. The UI elements of the phone appear to flip individually to match a landscape view. However, the notification area and the Settings menu are close to vanilla Android.
The unreleased Essential phone’s specs include the Snapdragon 730G SoC and 4GB RAM
Furthermore, the specs of the Essential Gem phone’s prototype are also revealed. The phone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G processor. The chipset is paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of native storage.
The display offers a resolution of 2,160 x 560 pixels and a refresh rate of 90Hz. The Gem is based on the Android 10 version. Similar to the Essential PH-1, the prototype variant doesn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack. That said, the Essential GEM could have been a powerful smartphone with a radically different design in 2019.
2024-07-16 15:07:23