The Essential Phone, Essential PH-1, or whatever you want to call it, was undoubtedly an extremely memorable phone that quickly amassed quite a fan following. Its in-hand feel and purist approach to software are still something that many swear by. However, the device never really tasted success, selling only 5000 units in total, which eventually led to an untimely demise of the company itself.
Jason Keats, former head of R&D of Essential feels that the major bummer can mostly be owed to the fact that the company lacked direction and was never really sure of the point of the Essential PH-1 itself (via Android Authority).
“One of the things that hurt Essential was, it wasn’t entirely clear what the point of Essential was, what we were building for, and that hurt us,” he says.
However, mistakes can be addressed, and a part of the extremely talented team behind the Essential Phone is now working on another smartphone offering dubbed OSOM OV1, this time with a key focus on security and privacy.
A strategy of bringing control back to the consumers is being followed with three key pillars across software, hardware, and marketing: privacy, simplicity (ease of use), and choice. Everyone has got stuff that they’d rather store locally than on the web to keep it more shielded against prying eyes, and everything being done by OSOM revolves around this – or in other words, “to help the user control what’s shared and what’s not shared.”
Accordingly, the OSOM company name very aptly stands for “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” – a subtle way to promote the firm’s belief in privacy and security. The name of the handset too follows a similar theme with OV-1 being short for OSOM Vault 1.
But even with all of the extra focus on security, the OSOM OV-1 isn’t going loose on simplicity and will feature a simple yet premium design, reminiscent of the original Essential Phone.
There’s a triangular camera island on the upper left corner of the rear which carries a dual-camera system and a flash. A rear capacitive fingerprint scanner will serve as a bouncer and a Qualcomm chipset will be powering the phone.
Apart from this, the phone will be running near-stock Android, of course, which again would feel just as slick as the software the Essential Phone ran. Full specs of the OSOM OV1 will be revealed at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February and a release is expected sometime this summer. Currently, the device is at the Engineering Validation and Testing (EVT1) stage and Keats says that the device was the best EVT1 experience of his career.
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