. Despite some solid interest and a decent track record when it came updates, the company announced the news on its official blog earlier, and also said that the Essential Phone will not be getting anymore updates — so far, updates have been on par with the Google Pixels, in terms of frequency and timeliness.
The news is pretty surprising, I suppose, with Essential earlier showing off a new — weird-looking — in its testing stages. The new Essential Phone had a strange form-factor: long and narrow, almost like a TV remote control. Additionally, Rubin talked about a “new UI for a radically different form-factor”, and the “GEM Colorshift material” of the phone was also something pretty interesting. Now, it appears, the entire Project GEM has been scrapped.
Essential was also rumoured to be developing a smart home assistant and an OS, but these projects never materialised into actual products that we could see. Regardless, the news that a tech startup — one with a history of doing this differently — is at the end of the road, despite controversy surrounding its founder, is sad to hear. Previously, a report from thealleged that sexual misconduct from Rubin led to his departure from search engine giant, Google.