Andy Rubin, creator of Android and CEO of Essential
just tweeted out a colorful glimpse into one of the most radically re-imagined
compact smartphones we have ever seen. It’s long, it’s thin, there’s a huge
camera at the back and also a fingerprint scanner. The guys at Essential call
this device “GEM” and the first tweet from Andy (after almost an year) shows
how color-shifty the design is. But it didn’t stop there.
Yes, that’s definitely Google Maps running on the
“GEM”. Let’s start from the top of the phone. There’s an ear piece grill right
at the top, the bezels all around the phone are equidistant (apparently that
was super hard to achieve on this phone), right below the ear piece seems to be
a “notch” area and my guess is, the punch hole houses a front facing camera.
Besides that, in software, you see an arrow and a battery indicator in that top
area of the UI which is blank. Below that is of course the entire Maps UI
reformatted to suit this new radically redesigned form factor.
