Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Andy Rubin's Essential Shutting Down, Newton Mail Service Ending Too
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The HyperCard guy? Wow, this is news to me. It was a lot easier to keep things covered up back then.
Can we brainstorm on this picture of the Essential Gem?? It looks like a remote, or a really slender smartphone. Any thoughts on that as a future mobile device of sorts??
I'd assume it could be useful in the "Post texting" age (maybe when everything is voice control, or even neural connection).
I'd assume it could be useful in the "Post texting" age (maybe when everything is voice control, or even neural connection).
Last edited:
Bad. Too bad. I never found anything remotely good when Newton shut down the first time. I instantly re-subscribed when it resurrected last year and thought to have find my peace of mind at last.. 
What do you mean? They've always had one. Always awesome and crazy sync with other devices, since ever. Also crazy capability of searching and finding years old emails between different email boxes.
What do you mean? They've always had one. Always awesome and crazy sync with other devices, since ever. Also crazy capability of searching and finding years old emails between different email boxes.
It's a nice looking phone (I'm a big fan of chamfered edges) and less competition is never a good thing so this sucks.
I use Spark on my iPhone which is okay and Canary on desktop which is a bit buggy but better than the stock app.
Mail.app, unfortunately. Everything else keep getting bought up by other companies and then shut down, or ends up having a privacy policy that freaks me out too much.
You don't use Spark on your Mac as well. I find it very close to the iOS version.
Isn't Andy Rubin the no-talent hack that came up with Android by copying BlackBerry, and when the iPhone came out they scrapped the whole idea to make a bad copy of iOS? I remember there was some article describing the events around the original iPhone launch and why Steve Jobs was so livid at this guy
Point being Essentials was never a competitor to anyone so nothing changes because of the their demise.
Waiting for the Firefox smartphone and open source OS.
Essential was a good phone, and they had timely updates until now.
The mail app quite possibly the best on mobile. Too bad Rubin is toxic. Those products went to waste.
Hopefully someone viable picks up the talent on the Essential team.
[automerge]1581548821[/automerge]
The mail app quite possibly the best on mobile. Too bad Rubin is toxic. Those products went to waste.
Hopefully someone viable picks up the talent on the Essential team.
[automerge]1581548821[/automerge]
Well, that's myopic.
"Andy Rubin is a b*tch boy." If you watch Front Page Tech you get the joke.
What a scumbag predator he is. Deserves every nasty thing said about him and then some.
Yup...great looking phone...too bad it ran Android and had camera issues.
It's a beautiful phone, for sure, and I believe it received updates almost as fast as the Pixel phones.
Not really. We only got two companies even doing smartphones that succeed: Apple and Google . Android or iOS. I really miss the variety we had as far back as 2010--BlackBerry, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, WebOS.
I miss that. Competition is good. But some force deemed it bad so if it ain't Apple or Google-based, it's out. As a result most of the OSs UI and apps look the same. Zero differeniation anymore. White with black text. That's it. Kinda bland. The Modern Mobile Market is boring, sterile, lackluster.
But what you’re describing IS competition working. That force you speak of is called the free market. Those other mobile OSes died off because they got out-competed. And now the two that the market chose are what remains.
Andy Rubin has more of a claim to mobile OSes than BlackBerry or Windows CE. He worked on Magic Cap starting in 1992 and then founded Danger, which was really the first consumer smartphone, and was the first smartphone which heavily relied on cloud services.
I doubt the market spoke in regards to WebOS and Windows Phone. Google basically told MS to go screw themselves and forced them to remove YouTube, Maps and so on that were useful and it killed anyone's interest in the platform. No Google Maps or Youtube? You're out!
WebOS was ruined by HP buying it out and cancelling it for some unforseen reason. WebOS was actually quite ahead of its time and most of Android 9/10's gesture nav comes from WebOS. Imagine what it could have become?
BlackBerry was a failure waiting to happen. When their CEO derided apps and mobile games saying "no one needs more than email in a smartphone" that was all folks! They basically EOLd themselves by not moving forward.
Still, we need more variety out there. iOS and Android both are becoming stale and boring. There's just not that excitement over a new smartphone launch like there was in 2007 when the first iPhone launched. Innovation is just gone. It's incremental changes and all phones look identical lately. Where's the sliders? small and large screens? the features? These days you pay $1500 and LOSE features instead of gaining them. No more headphone jack, home button or IR blaster. Does anyone see that as backwards? Seriously, my Galaxy S5 has far more features and options than an iPhone 11 Pro (well, other than camera)
I'm convinced people like you get an endorphin rush from virtue signaling when you unnecessarily politicize things like this and try to characterize people as irredeemable monsters.
The company was far larger than one man that made some bad decisions in his professional life.
