Andy Rubin, the co founder of Android is back with his own brand 'Essential'. Rubin, best known as the co-founder of Android, is creating a high-end smartphone to take on the likes of the Galaxy S8 and iPhone 7 Plus. The Essential, revealed by The Verge, is a modular phone designed to enhance the functionality, with add-on attachments in the form of a 360-degree camera and a charging dock.
The Smartphone is equipped with a sharp display that runs from edge-to-edge and takes up almost the entire front of the device, Qualcomm's high-end Snapdragon 835 processor with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage.The bezel isn’t there to house a home button, instead a fingerprint scanner cum a home button can be found on the back of the phone.
It's also made out of titanium, instead of aluminum, which Essential says will help the phone survive accidental drops.
The front-facing camera has an eight megapixel sensor and is capable of recording 4K video, while the rear camera is 13-megapixel with a second monochrome sensor to help boost low-light shots. That’s a departure from a secondary lens for bokeh-style images as Apple has done with the iPhone 7 Plus.However, the Essential lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack, but The Verge says the company will ship a headphone dongle in the box.
Rubin bets big on the concept of modularity that essentially differentiates the Essential from the Galaxy S8, iPhone 7 Plus and LG G6. To begin with, the company has introduced two new accessories – a 360-degree camera and a wireless dock. Both accessories can be attached to the phone via a magnetic connector.
But the biggest news of all might be the OS that runs on that speaker. Essential is calling it Ambient OS, and says that the goal is to “activate” your home by understanding the physical layout of your home, its occupants, and the various services and devices available to them. Ambient calls this “activating” your home, and says the Ambient OS is an “API” to all those things in combinations, allowing new kinds of applications to exist on top of them — like flashing your lights when a timer goes off.
“The home is your own space where you should be able to say what you want, without having to worry about your privacy,” Essential writes on its website.
The company also offers up information about Ambient, the OS behind the Home product too:
Ambient OS provides a set of services and abstractions that enable the development and execution of applications that run in the context of your home. With Ambient OS, your home is the computer. Ambient OS is aware of the physical layout of your home, the people that live in it, services relevant to both your home and the people within, and devices.
Key to Ambient OS is the belief that people should always be in control. To this end, it does not try to make your home smart by anticipating what you need. Instead, as it learns from people, it can suggest certain behaviors but in the end people decide whether or not use them.
The Essential will run on Android when it launches, but is currently available on pre-order in the US. Andy Rubin’s first smartphone doesn’t come cheap though, with the device costing $699 (or approx Rs. 45,202). The company will sell the Essential with a 360-degree camera that will cost $749 (or approx Rs. 48,437).
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