Essential officially closed its doors after failing to bring a new Gem phone to market

The company tried to grab attention with the Essential Phone (PH-1), but ultimately failed Reviews like ours were scathing, calling it "beautiful, but not fully finished" The company attempted a comeback after rumors of its near demise with the Gem, an oddly elongated candy bar-like phone that was supposed to bring some innovation to the mobile world

But after bold claims, Gem disappeared into vaporware territory, and the company announced its definitive closure

Essential was founded by Andy Rubin, a former manufacturing engineer at Apple from 1989 to 1992 and one of the creators of Android He rose to a high position at Google after the Mountain View company acquired the operating system to start its own cell phone business to compete with Apple According to the New York Times, Rubin was accused of forced sex by an employee in 2013 and asked to resign by Google It became a major scandal when it was discovered that Google paid him $90 million in severance in an attempt to protect him

The scandal clearly took a toll on the company after the release of the modular Essential Phone; Essential has not revealed the exact reasons for the closure, other than stating that there was no "clear path" to offer Gem, but the failure of PH-1 and the founder's After the sex scandal that tainted the company's founder, it is reasonable to assume that the company struggled to find the financial resources needed to take Gem from prototype to final product

As the father of android, Rubin made a lot of noise by promising an android phone that was better than anyone else's That hype did not materialize, and the phone was deemed underpowered and flawed despite its clean hardware design and softwareEIC According to a review by Mark Spoonauer and Mike Prospero, "The Essential Phone , gorgeous Android phone with an edge-to-edge screen, clever modular design, and refreshingly clean software, but the camera is a disappointment so far"

The phone never really took off in the market and became a niche device Essential kept its promise to update as soon as a new version of Android became available, but by then no one cared

After the much-publicized sex scandal, Rubin and Essential attempted a comeback with a new one called Gem

The device raised some eyebrows in the online community and threw up some great ideas, but did not seem to have enough power to drive it through development and release