It turns out that the folding phone isn’t the only weird form factor these days. Andy Rubin, the man behind Essential, just posted the first photos of the company’s upcoming phone on Twitter. It’s quite the departure from the PH-1, but if you like how tall Sony’s 21:9 phones are, you’re in for a real treat.
New UI for radically different formfactor pic.twitter.com/Es8hFrTuxx
— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) October 8, 2019
This is possibly the weirdest phone we’ve seen in a while, Galaxy Fold and ZTE Axon M included. It looks to be about as tall as an open flip phone… except that it isn’t a flip phone. A better way to describe it would perhaps to say it’s a half-width phone. Up top, we can see a hole-punch camera, as well as what appear to be two navigation buttons. One image shows a maps app that doesn’t appear to be Google Maps or anything we’ve seen before, though it does have different transport options. The other shows the general UI, which features icons for Uber, weather, maps, and calendar apps that each take up about a quarter of the extremely tall screen. This is most likely some custom Android-based skin, but we can’t really tell. Also shown are some color-shifting options that are equally as zany as the phone itself.
GEM Colorshift material pic.twitter.com/QJStoiDleH
— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) October 8, 2019
Truth be told, this is possibly the first phone I’m excited to check out in a long time, purely because of how insane it is. How could you not want to try a phone that’s half as wide as anything else on the market? It’s a modern-day Juke!