After just one phone, Essential Products ascends to the great venture capitalist in the sky Essential Products, the troubled handset manufacturer from Android daddy Andy Rubin, has ceased operations. Founded in 2015, Essential Products had ambitions to create an entire mobile ecosystem, ranging from devices and accessories, to a brand-new operating system designed for the Internet of Things. Despite that grand plan …
Agreed. I don't care that much about the notch, though I can certainly do without it; but bezels are useful in a number of respects. They make the phone easier to hold, they help prevent inadvertent input, they help protect the screen (and they make it easier to apply a screen protector), and so on.
Edge-to-edge screens (and worse those stupid wraparound screens) are an affectation that makes the device significantly worse.
From what I understand they burned through $330 million of "outside funding" which I am assuming is money from the VC crowd.
I am hoping that the money came from a whole lot of otherwise useless trust fund babies, and is now circulating in the economy like it should be.
I know, I can dream.
It seems to me that the primary reason for its demise is the fact that it didn't learn anything from its first mistake. It should have taken stock in the market's reaction, reviewed the issues and built a point-by-point action plan.
Instead, EP management obviously decided to just go and do the same thing again (create an even more "revolutionary" model) but expecting fame and fortune as a result which, as we all know here, is the definition of insanity.
I like my Essential phone, but I picked it up at $250 instead of launch price. At that price the so-so camera isn't a deal breaker, and I did get the 360 camera attachment. They could have followed up with a second phone with a better camera and lower price, but they wanted to make SHINY-SQUIRREL instead. They changed focus more times than my cats. But they made a decent bare-bones Android phone.
"The add on bus is unique."
That might have been a problem. If the bus is unique, that means three things. 1. Nobody else can put that bus on their phone easily, assuming that the original designers license it out at all, because the bus would require lots of new hardware and software. 2. It is not easy for other companies to produce add-ons to connect to that bus because the tech behind it is unusual, so they'd probably have to implement new protocols to make use of it. Both of which lead us to 3. nobody has an incentive to support the bus, so the only place doing anything with it is the original manufacturer, which means there are no add-ons for a while and only one eventually, which means that users feel cheated by a feature that never became useful and potential customers think it's pointless to buy the product.
I can see lots of great possibilities for a hardware extension system, but one company alone can't do it. I'm unsure if it can be done, but if it can, it would require a standard freely available to device and peripheral manufacturers, so the abandonment of the concept by one won't render the idea pointless.
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