Andy Rubin's Essential is Shutting Down (engadget.com) 64
Essential, Android creator Andy Rubin's high-profile phone startup, is shutting down. From a report: As a result of the shutdown, Essential says it will no longer support the Essential Phone with further security updates or customer support. Additionally, Newton Mail, which Essential acquired when it purchased developer CloudMagic in 2018, will stop working on May 1st. On its blog, Essential cites Project Gem, the tallish concept phone the company teased late last year, and its inability to find a "clear path" to get the device to consumers as the main reason for the shutdown. The startup had raised about $330 million.
Krytonite for Phone companies (Score:3)
This is like the third company Andy Rubin is ruining.
Kin
Microsoft Phone
Now Essential
he is the Kryptonite of Phone companies and yet VCs keep giving him money
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Oh, yeah. And Android. This guy's batting average is terrible.
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All the success of Android does not get close to balancing even 10% of the damage done to the phone ecosystems by Kin wasting 2 years of crucial time for Microsoft.
In 2006 I had a decent 3 in 1 (As smartphones were called then) running Windows Mobile 5. The only thing it did not have was a capacitive touch screen where you could use fingers and had a resistive touch screen where you used a stylus
In 2007 iPhone came out with not even half the functionality of Windows phone but it had a capacitive touch scr
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Do you even math, Bro?
Zero times zero is zero, wasting years on windows phones sells the same number as doing whatever nonsense Internet Guy assumes they do at those work places.
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Take an English class or dont type when drunk
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I'm a native English speaker who tests to within the 99th percentile in language comprehension.
If you were unable to understand my words, or you disliked the stylistic flair that I applied, that does not in any way imply that I would benefit from taking English classes.
Perhaps you thought you learned English, but you actually learned Continental Pidgin.
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No of people sPeaking English
India 350 million
US 300 million (the rest are monolingual in Spanish or German)
UK 50 million
and it goes down.
Any Language's standard form is defined by its most commonly spoken dialect which for English is Indian.
Unless you speak English with an Indian accent you basically speak a dialect of English or as you like to call it Pidgin..
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If you've already peaked, I recommend drinking a glass of warm milk. It sounds silly, but it will help. A lot. Also, detach the coax from your modem until you've come all the way down. You'll thank me tomorrow.
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No, because you had to sell your Windows Mobile program yourself on your own website. You could use a store that sold your app for you, but they generally acted like retail stores that took 50% of the price. Or you could try to roll it yourself and hopefully have people use Paypal to avoid having to open a merchant account.
You st
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Some of what you say is true. But the problem with Apple's appstore model is that its not a choice. Even developers with the tech savvy to run their own distribution system have to pay the Apple Tax. If Apple had done what they did for Mac Desktop Apps - an appstore which takes care of everything you mentioned for a 30% cut or you are free to roll your own distribution , than I would not complain about Apple taking 30% but they did not give that choice to iOS devs. They were able to make this draconian deci
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Thats the Wanker who hired the Kin team to ruin Windows Mobile.
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Windows Mobile was ruined long before Ballmer brought them in.
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From a functionality perspective Windows Mobile was a very powerfull system at least till Windows Mobile 5. Sure Apple's UI was more user friendly as they were planning to sell to techno-noobs with loads of money. These are people who would not react well to being told to learn something instead the system needs to be dumbed down to their level. The same noobs as they have grown more techno savvy have asked for and got more power till the current iOS of 2019 is almost as powerful functionality wise as the
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Oh, yeah. And Android. This guy's batting average is terrible.
Well, with the non-Android projects he didn't have the benefit of Eric Schmidt handing him the pre-release iPhone to mimic, so his failure is totally understandable.
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Except that his Android was a shitty copy of a Blackberry until the iPhone launched, then his Android was a shitty copy of an iPhone. He left, and Android then turned into what it is today.
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Your view of Android is only skin deep. Internally, it was a huge step forward for mobile development.
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Rather indicates that Android succeeded in spite of Rubin.
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This is like the third company Andy Rubin is ruining: Kin, Microsoft Phone, Now Essential
He is the Kryptonite of Phone companies and yet VCs keep giving him money
Probably not ruining his bank account though: "The startup had raised about $330 million."
(Yes, I know he doesn't get all that, but I imagine he gets paid pretty well by his failures ...)
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Hell, he got paid $90M to GTFO by Google even though they had clear reason to fire him for cause, he's clearly set for life.
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He is probably the only guy who got paid 90 Million for getting a blowjob. Generally guys end up paying for them.
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You can't blame Rubin for that. Kin was the mess Microsoft made after buying Danger Incorporated and completely failing to understand why people bought their products. You can blame Andy Lees for alienating the existing developers with his insistence that they drop Java and run a full Microsoft stack on Windows CE. Roz Ho also had a major role in that screw-up after requesting to be transferred there. She'd been pretty successful running MacBU and getting MS Office for Mac to a state where people act
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Damn I think you are right . I did confuse them. Probably owe Rubin an apology.
So just to be clear Andy Rubin is the one who fucks colleagues and Andy Lee is the one who fucked Microsoft?
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How do I find VCs like this? I guarantee it would only take me 10 million dollars to prove I don't know how to run a phone company.
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Thats your first mistake. VCs are not like people playing the lottery, they are the gamblers at the high stakes tables. If you ask for 10 million they are not interested. Ask for 10 billion or rather 1 billion for 10% of the company and they would be interested.
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Even tech entrepreneurs take a while to burn 300 mil.
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Depends. The last time he got a blowjob from a colleague he ended up getting paid 90 million to leave the company.
If with the metoo movement he now ends up paying 90 million a blowjob thats just 4 Blowjobs to blow through all that money.
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Sure, the blowjob doesn't take very long, but then it takes HR months of wanking to actually do the firing, there's the ass kissing at the retirement party, and the ritual cunnilingus with the media. All this... activity... takes time.
Name never matched the product (Score:3)
"Essential" always sounded like a name for a very simple, very cheap product. Nothing flashy, just the essentials. Certainly not the premium phone they made.
Maybe now some Chinese company can buy the name and produce stuff like that.
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And indeed there have been a bunch of product lines where the one model with the least features carried the model name "Essential".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ah the Porsche pricing system. The more you pay the less features the car has. Don't want a radio? Extra $1000. No floor mats, extra $1500. No doorhandles just a fabric strap? $2000. As Jeremy Clarkson joked eventually Porsche will deliver you nothing but a bill for $1 million.
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They might not still have removable batteries unless it is a dumb phone.
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The cheap tier of T-Mobile service is called "essential," too.
newton mail (Score:2)
so newton mail will quit working again when Essential close up shop. Sure glad I did not renew my yearly subscription last week. I got burned when cloudmagic bit the dust but was glad when Essential bought them. Going to miss alexa reading my emails using their skill. I wonder how many did renew their subscription since newton only restarted last February.
They should have made an Essential PH-2... (Score:3)
.. not that weird abomination they tried for their second attempt. The PH-1 is beautiful, Make it as big as the S10+, add a better camera (I found id good enough). I would have bought it. I bought the first one and loved it, I guess I have a collectors edition now.
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Agreed. The only thing I wanted from a PH2 would have been 5G wireless. And I never came CLOSE to using all 128GB of RAM on my PH1.
Newton mail (Score:3, Interesting)
Gotta love email middleware. Oh, and given that Newton was consolidating your email onto their own servers, your email messages and various email passwords will probably end up with whichever entity buys the husk of Essential.
And the February update is fucked up (Score:2)
The February update did something bizarre to the boot image so lots of Essential community tooling doesn't work for it. This has the Bluetooth RCE fix which is important.
Since they promised everybody updates through August 2020 as a condition of purchase, it sounds like there will be plenty of creditors in the bankruptcy deal.
They need to at least open their proprietary blobs and QAM repair keys - they have no value to anybody except the community of users.
LineageOS has mediocre support which could get bet
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Since they promised everybody updates through August 2020 as a condition of purchase, it sounds like there will be plenty of creditors in the bankruptcy deal.
Thanks for the laugh. If you think they'll get anything at all from owed promises, I got a bridge to sell you...
no shit! (Score:2)
"and its inability to find a "clear path" to get the device to consumers"
Did these fucks not figure out what "exclusive" fucking means?
And they did the exclusive with Sprint too. This should be a master class in how to fuck yourself over as a business man!
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Venture capitalists have savvy?
Venture capital is, by definition, extra money that doesn't have a use. If you don't have very much of it, you hang onto it until you find something promising, then take it and go have an ad-venture with it. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn't.
If you have so much extra money lying around, and it's not very valuable to you, that you hire someone else to go have adventures with it, well, easy come, easy go.
Re:$330 million (Score:4, Insightful)
Venture Capital is intended for companies like Essential that are probably not going to work out, but also might work extremely well. It's an important function in a healthy economy, giving financing to riskier project. Also, every single investor in Essential was aware of the possibility that failure was more likely than not.
So I'm not sure how this proves anything, except that it proves SirAstral has no idea what he's talking about, but still talks about it for some reason.
Re: $330 million (Score:1)
The Surveillance Valley / Sandhill Road cartel style of venture capitalism is dysfunctional. It funds loss-making companies that dump products on the market at below cost. Thereby squeezing any legitimate companies - that have to turn a profit to survive - out of the market.
The VC profits depend on a few of those loss-making companies being aquired by one of the big monopolies for megabucks. Without bloated, nepotistic monopolies eager to buy up loss-making companies to exploit their users, the whole system
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Stop with that generational warfare shit. Our common enemy is the ruling class, elites. Don't fall for their ploy of making us fight with one another.
In Europe something like this would never have seen the light of day in the first place. Heck, in most of the world they don't have the risk-taking culture that America has. It didn't work. So did a lot of them. Sounds like you don't know how venture capitalists work. Not a surprise.
And the Point Was? (Score:1)
Very Sorry To Hear This (Score:2)
I'm very sorry to read this, because I _REALLY_ love my Essential PH1 phone. After 2 1/2 years, it still works perfectly; even the battery is even still pretty good.
Frankly, the only thing I ever wanted from a PH2 model phone would have been 5G wireless.
the Premium Market is packed. (Score:2)
Apple, Samsung, Google and LG
Have really made the Premium fancy phone market rather saturated.
Now there is still markets, but not for these Premium Fancy Phones, but for more utilitarian phones. Phones that are more affordable, Phones that offer more connectors, phones that are more rugged, phones for gaming, phones for phone calls (nah).
It was essential. (Score:1)
It was actually a pretty good phone. (Score:2)
I'm an independent app developer (not affiliated with Google or Essential). I go through a lot of phones and have a ton of test devices. I used one for about 8 months, which is a very long time for me. This phone was actually pretty good in my opinion.
Pros:
* First notch design with edge-to-edge screen (3 sides + traditional bottom bezel). Still higher screen-body-ratio than any iPhone today.
* Same bloat-free Android OS as Google Pixels, minus Google's additional bloat added to Pixels. No additional s