Phone promises solution to life’s tedious tasks

‘ESSENTIAL’ GADGET

in their smartphones for the next 10 minutes. Rubin is partly responsible for this anti-social behaviour; he helped create Android, which powers 85 per cent of the world’s smartphones.

Rubin acknowledges the downsides to the smartphone revolution he helped unleash and says his new hardware company, Essential, is working on ways to solve the tendency to check one’s phone every five minutes. “We all Andy Rubin lived happy lives before we had always-on internet,” he says in an exclusive interview at Playground Global, his Palo Alto, California, incubator.

This week marks the debut of Essential’s first gadget. The Essential Phone is an anomaly: a sleek, premium smartphone not designed by Apple, Samsung or a discount Chinese brand. It has a mirrored ceramic back, titanium edges, a display that covers most of the phone’s front and a magnetic connector for a new world of accessories and hardware upgrades that he says will let people hang onto their phones longer.

Rubin recognizes that Essential confronts formidable competition, especially from Apple and Samsung. But while he applauds the former’s brand power and the latter’s vertical integration, he said “every saturated market needs a disruption. When there’s a duopoly, that’s the time to do it.”

He says it’s best to view Essential’s first phone as a starting point — it runs the same Android OS as Google’s Pixel — not a radical departure. That will come later, he says, and will involve using artificial intelligence to change the way people interact with their devices, in part by outsourcing some of the more tedious tasks to an algorithm.

“If I can get to the point where your phone is a virtual version of you, you can be off enjoying your life, having that dinner, without touching your phone, and you can trust your phone to do things on your behalf,” he says. “I think I can solve part of the addictive behaviour.”

Rubin, 54, has been in the phone game for almost 20 years. In the early aughts, he spearheaded development of a handset called the Hiptop (later known as the Sidekick) that featured a big screen, full physical keyboard and ran apps. It heralded the coming of the smartphone juggernaut. Rubin left in 2003 to start again, creating a mobile software startup called Android that he sold to Google in 2005.

After turning Android into the world’s preeminent operating system, he left three years ago to start work on his third act: Essential.