This is not going to save the company –
Essential throws out all the usual conventions with “Project Gem.”
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Essential’s Project Gem. It has the form factor of a TV remote.
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The back has a single-lens camera and a divot, presumably for a fingerprint reader.
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The “Gem” name clearly comes from the color-shifting paint on the back.
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What is going on with this operating system? Where is the time and reception? How do notifications work? Where are the apps? Why is everything a widget? How do you navigate? This is all so strange and scary-looking.
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This is not Google Maps. It’s also not Bing Maps, or Here Maps, or Apple Maps, or Waze, or Mapquest. Essential is using some never-before-seen map app.
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We can at least figure out the data is from OpenStreetMap. The detail in the airport runway is a dead giveaway. There’s also live traffic data, somehow.
Essential / Ron Amadeo / All those map companies
Believe it or not, Essential seems financially solvent enough to release one more (one last?) Smartphone. Despite having no discernible income since the complete flop of theEssential Phonein 2017,Cancelingthe Essential Phone sequel, canceling its smart home device, beingput up for sale, laying off30% of its staff, and having its founder and CEO Andy Rubin stained by asexual misconduct scandal, Essential is somehow still around. And it hopes you’ll forget about all that while it teases a shiny new smartphoneon Twitter.
Meet “Project Gem,” a tall, ultra-skinny smartphone with an aspect ratio approaching that of a TV remote. It looks like what would happen if you took a normal smartphone and cut it in half vertically. The front has an even bezel all the way around the phone, with a hole-punch camera in the top-left corner. The back has a sizable camera bump for the single-lens camera and a divot for your finger, which could be a button, or a fingerprint reader, or both. The color scheme definitely lives up to the “Gem” name, with four versions each showing a different shiny, color-shifting finish.
Every phone must be assumed to run Android unless proven otherwise, but boy, does this not look like normal Android. The hero image features what we assume is the home screen, showing a clock widget, a music widget, and apps icons that live in a 2×2 grid of tiles, making it look a bit like Windows Phone. The home-screen design seems to prefer showing apps as square widgets with some info and functionality, rather than app icons. The Spotify widget shows music controls, the Gallery shows a picture preview, calendar shows your next appointment, “Maps” shows a map with your current location, and we’re going to assume the weather widget shows a weather preview. It’s different, but it also looks pretty scroll heavy, since only four widgets are necessary to fill up the screen.
There doesn’t seem to be much in terms of a system-level UI for displaying things like system navigation buttons, the time, your cell reception, or any notifications. How does any of that work on Project Gem? The only piece of universal UI seems to be a small, horizontal-line button in the top-right corner. What does that do? There’s also what might be a “back” button in the opposite corner, next to the camera, in the Maps screenshot.
GEM Colorshift materialpic.twitter.com/QJStoiDleH
– Andy Rubin (@Arubin)October 8, 2019
All the evidence we have about the Gem phone so far suggests it is an Android phone without access to the Play Store and Google apps.XDA Developersdiscovered Android commits from Essential employees referencing this “Gem” phone, and one of the attached screenshots exposed a build string “gem-q-microg-userdebug MICROG.QP1A. 190711. 020. ” You can pick a few bits of data out of this string (it runs Android 10 and was built on 07 / 11 / 2019). But the big piece of info is that this build runs “MicroG,” an open source reimplementation for Google Play Services. MicroG is built specifically for devices without Google’s apps and services, allowing apps that call on proprietary Google APIs to still run on non-Google devices. The Gem phone runs an Android fork.
MicroG mostly exists as an open source project for home tinkerers who want to build an all-open source version of Android. It has never been tested in a commercial product, andMicroG’s Github pagedescribes itself as “alpha-grade software and not yet ready for production use.” The lack of a real app ecosystem helps explain why many of the apps look so generic. The only two name brands on the phone are Spotify and Uber, and both of those services have Web apps.
Without Google Maps, it looks like Essential is rolling its own map app. The app, which was prominently featured in one of the five images, is just called “Maps” with a positively generic blue icon. The mapping data is a match for OpenStreetMap, and the app design and iconography don’t match anything on the market. There’s also what looks to be live traffic data somehow, which Essential must be licensing from a provider.
How input would work on a device like this is unclear. A normal keyboard would be nigh-unusable on a display this skinny. A 2018 report from
Bloomberg definitely got the “small screen” part right, so maybe the primary input is voice? XDA found references to a “fingerprint walkie-talkie” mode, so perhaps the divot on the back is a fingerprint reader, and you press on it when you want to enter a voice command.
There’s also an AT&T logo in the clock. Does that mean AT&T is a launch partner, or is that just a mockup? The Essential Phone’s only US carrier partner was Sprint.
That’s about it for Essential’s Project Gem, a phone that raises a whole host of questions with some very concerning answers. Will you really be able to type and use apps on a smartphone this skinny? Does anyone want an app-less smartphone in 2019? Do you want to constantly talk to your smartphone if voice input is the primary option? Will this phone be another commercial failure, and will a second flop be the death of Essential?
Essential says it “looks forward to sharing more in the near future.”
Listing image by (Essential)
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