Essential is dead! Many may have seen it coming but a few of us held on to a tiny string of hope that the company founded by Andy Rubin will launch a new smartphone.
In a post released on its website, Essential announced that Project GEM, the colorful and interesting phone that showed up in images on the web last October will not be launching. “Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential,” the blog post said.
Essential said in the post that the February 3 security update rolled out to the Essential PH-1 is the final update for the device. The phone will continue to work but there will be no more updates or customer support. However, they will host a prebuilt vendor image as well as everything else needed by developers for the PH-1 on their GitHub. So expect custom ROMs and the likes to continue to be available for the PH-1.
They also announced that Newton Mail, the paid cross-platform email app it owns, will continue to work until April 30, 2020.
Essential has also shared some videos that show Project GEM in action. While they give us a look at the features of a phone that will never launch, they are actually quite interesting. You can check out the videos in the source link.
Essential may have had a very short stint in the mobile phone industry but it will always be remembered as a company that tried to do things differently.
(Source)
