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Essential and Android co-founder Andy Rubin has a crazy tall mystery phone – The Verge, The Verge

Essential and Android co-founder Andy Rubin has a crazy tall mystery phone – The Verge, The Verge


  

We know next to nothing about the images you’re about to see – except that they don’t look like any phone we’ve ever seen before, and that they come from Andy Rubin, the controversial mobile industry executive who co-founded Android,left Google amid allegations of sexual misconduct while retaining a huge severance package, and went on to create theEssential Phone. (He also co-created the T-Mobile Sidekick, aka Danger Hiptop, many years ago.)

The photos appear to show an elongated phone with a very, very tall UI composed of card-like apps, but with big buttons that look like they’d be perfectly at home on a smartwatch. It look extremely small in his hands, too. The device has a large button and volume rocker on the right edge and a fingerprint divot around back, below what appears to be a single main camera.

And as you can see, these devices have some decidedly flashy finishes that change color when you view them at different angles – a sea green that shifts to yellow and blue, for example.

An Essential spokesperson confirmed to theThe Vergethat this is the company’s new phone, adding: “We’ve been working on a new device that’s now in early testing with our team outside the lab. We look forward to sharing more in the near future. ”

The original Essential Phone was known for its flashy design, including a sea green color with gold accentsknown as Ocean Depths. And in late 2018,Bloombergreported that Essential was working ona phone with a smaller screen that’d be controlled mostly through voice commands, with an AI assistant automatically performing tasks for you. In December,Essential all but confirmed it was working on a second phone.

If some leaked code snippetsspotted by XDA-Developersandan Essential trademark applicationpan out, “GEM” might actually be the name of the new phone, and it may activate its voice assistant when you tap your finger to that divot around back – the code snippets mention a “fingerprint walkie talkie” mode. They also suggest it runs Android and point at aQualcomm Snapdragon 730 processor, whose midrange performance might make sense for a device that’s designed more as a mobile companion than becoming the digital center of your life.

While we wait for more info, perhaps you’d like to know more about that robot dog that’s lurking in the background of Rubin’s snapshots? That’s theBoston Dynamics Spot– from a company that Andy Rubin helped Googletemporarily purchase back in 2013, by the way – and we’ve got an awesome video about Spot that you can watch below.

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