Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone with AI assistant will begin shipping next month

The co-creator of Android, Andy Rubin has unveiled a new phone by name Essential PH-1 this Tuesday. Along with that, he also launched a new product known as Essential Home in smart speaker segment.

Rubin gave away few pieces of information regarding this smartphone in an interview with Walt Mossberg held at the Code conference. He told that the phone will begin its shipping after 30 days and the company has already started accepting the pre-orders with the starting price of $699 (around Rs. 45,200). He also revealed the presence of their own AI assistant in both the Essential device.

He spoke about the current trend of offering the phones in the phablet-sized screens to provide a more interactive surface for the user. He showed the handset in the conference to speak about the vanilla Android interface and also the modular approach used by the company to offer some add-on functionalities.

The company has also unveiled a 360-degree lens for $50 along with this smartphone. Rubin stated that he is ready to integrate any third party AI assistants in these devices if the company is ready to make it compatible with the Ambient OS used in the Essential Home. This Ambient OS is written to be open source similar to Android.

Speaking about the OS upgrade, he told that it is impossible to roll out an upgrade to all the customers. To support this statement, he claimed that not even the Apple manages to send updates to all the devices. So, only 60 to 70 percent of the Apple devices receive the upgrade. He told company will work on this upgrade issue faced by few of the devices.