On Twitter yesterday, Android cofounder Andy Rubin began hyping a new smartphone his company Essential is working on. It’s a long, thin device with a long, thin user interface. For many of us, it was the first time we’d thought about Rubin since The Information reported in 2017 that he’d had an “inappropriate” relationship with a Google employee, before he controversially left the company with a very generous severance package. It may be too soon. It is difficult to disentangle the radically elongated smartphone from its creator’s reputation. If that’s not reason enough to skip supporting or buying a smartphone from Essential, the device itself seems like a throwback, a design that might have seemed like a promising departure in the smartphone’s earlier days. But now it just looks like a novelty—an idea in search of a use case. From the photos, the new phone appears to be very thin, not much wider than a smartwatch. It looks so long that the end of it would very likely stick up out of a pocket
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Andy Rubin should stop designing smartphones