Co-founder of Android and CEO of Essential Inc., Andy Rubin, took to Twitter to show the world the latest mobile hardware device he and his team have been working on. Suffice to say this is unlike anything we have ever seen before.
The tweets by Mr. Rubin showing off the new device come nearly a year since the last one on October 25, 2018.
…still dialing in the colors pic.twitter.com/4gEpFU7mpZ
— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) October 8, 2019
The first tweet shows four devices of varying colors facing downwards in a styrofoam block. The phones look nothing like any modern phone sold right now. You could mistake them for fancy remotes based on their form factor or even an open clamshell phone.
Each one has a huge camera bump with a single sensor in the middle. There is an LED flash at the top left corner while a fingerprint scanner is positioned below the camera. The caption for the tweet says “GEM Colorshift material”, and boy do these colors shift depending on the angle you look at the phones.
A second tweet shows us the same phones but in a still image. The last tweet is the most interesting of all as it shows us the front of the phone.
The new Essential phone is shown to have a display with a very tall aspect ratio. There are bezels of equal lengths on all sides and they don’t make the phone bigger than it should be.
New UI for radically different formfactor pic.twitter.com/Es8hFrTuxx
— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) October 8, 2019
The display itself has a large punch hole in the top left corner for the selfie camera. There is an arrow icon pointing to the left of the screen while a red button is at the far top right corner. We believe these are the navigation and close app keys respectively.
In one of the photos, the phone is shown running a maps app that sure doesn’t look like Google Maps while the other image shows multiple apps on the screen with each taking a small quarter of the phone’s display.
[envira-gallery id=”281454″]As you can see, there is an Uber app, a calendar app, a maps app, and a weather app. Each app takes up a small part of the screen but does so in a very neat way. The caption for this tweet says “New UI for radically different form factor”.
It sure is running a user interface we haven’t seen on any device before, but nevertheless, we believe it is still based on Android.
We are really excited about this new device from Essential Inc. whose first and last phone is the Essential PH-1 which was released back in 2017. We expect more details about the new phone will surface soon.
Update begins here:
The official Essential Twitter account has shared more photos of the new device and one of them gives us a look at the phone’s homescreen.
There is a clock widget at the top with two circles – one showing the phone’s battery level and the other showing the signal level and type (LTE in this case). We also see that the phone is on AT&T’s network.
The homescreen has a UI similar to that of Windows Mobile with its Live Tiles. There is a Spotify tile as well as tiles for phone, maps, camera, messages, and gallery. This photo also gives us another look at the punch hole which houses the selfie camera. The red button at the top red corner in one of the first set of photos is now white.
The new Essential Phone is really comfortable to hold thanks to its really narrow frame. The power button and volume rocker are on the left side of the device but none of the photos give us a good look at the other sides to know if there are extra buttons and the type of ports available.
The second photo shows the phone in all the four colors it will be available in – red, green, blue, and yellow. Thanks to the color-shifting effect, all four will look different depending on the angle you are looking at them from. In this photo, we can also see a transparent TPU case in the corner.
We've been working on a new device to reframe your perspective on mobile. It's now in early testing with our team outside the lab. Look forward to sharing more in the near future! #ProjectGEM pic.twitter.com/BnVy7yM2Kj
— Essential (@essential) October 9, 2019
The caption for the tweet says Essential has been working on a new device to reframe our perspective on mobile. It is already in testing outside the lab and more details will be shared in the near future. The tweet ends with the hashtag #ProjectGEM.
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