Sources: after disappointing sales, Andy Rubin's Essential is building a new phone with a small screen that will mostly rely on voice commands
- Mobile device would conduct tasks itself or via voice control — Startup pauses work on home speaker to focus on new gadget
Context & Ripple Effects
Essential's arc has been a retreat in stages: the hardware suite Andy Rubin's startup laid out in early 2017 narrowed to a single phone, then by mid-2018 the company was reportedly considering selling itself and had canceled a new smartphone. The Essential Home speaker, announced as a privacy-focused Amazon Echo competitor with a round auto-display, was supposed to be the second act.
This report closes that loop: with phone sales disappointing, Essential is pausing the home speaker entirely and redirecting the team toward a small-screen device that mostly runs on voice commands — effectively conceding the conventional flagship race while keeping a hardware bet alive.
First-order effects
- Essential's engineering resources move off Essential Home, stalling the Echo challenger before it shipped, and onto a voice-first small-screen phone whose success depends on voice-command quality rather than display specs.
- Buyers waiting on either product get clarity of a grim kind: no home speaker for now, and a next phone that will look unlike anything Essential has sold so far.
Second-order effects
- Amazon loses one of the few privacy-positioned rivals to the Echo in the smart-speaker market, reinforcing its hold on the home just as Essential exits.
- A stalled second product makes Essential's earlier sale exploration more urgent — the company is now pitching a single unproven device category rather than a portfolio.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, struggling handset makers stop competing on screens and reposition around assistants — a direction the corpus already anticipates in OpenAI's planned screen-free companion device, suggesting voice-first hardware becomes the fallback lane for phone-era startups.
- The shift implies an industry structure where the assistant layer, not the device maker, captures the value — favoring companies that own voice platforms over those assembling hardware around them.
The trend: Consumer hardware startups are abandoning conventional smartphones for voice-first, screen-light devices, turning the assistant into the product and the gadget into its shell.