The extremely talented team behind the Essential Phone is now working on another smartphone offering dubbed OSOM OV1, this time with a key focus on security and privacy. A strategy of bringing control back to the consumers is being followed with three key pillars across software, hardware, and marketing: privacy, simplicity (ease of use), and choice. Everyone has got stuff that they’d rather store locally than on the web to keep it more shielded against prying eyes, and everything being done by OSOM revolves around this – or in other words, “to help the user control what’s shared and what’s not shared.”
Accordingly, the OSOM company name very
aptly stands for “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” – a subtle way to promote the
firm’s belief in privacy and security. The name of the handset too follows a
similar theme with OV-1 being short for OSOM Vault 1.
But even with all of the extra focus on
security, the OSOM OV-1 isn’t going loose on simplicity and will feature a
simple yet premium design, reminiscent of the original Essential Phone. There’s
a triangular camera island on the upper left corner of the rear which carries a
dual-camera system and a flash. A rear capacitive fingerprint scanner will
serve as a bouncer and a Qualcomm chipset will be powering the phone.
Apart from this, the phone will be running
near-stock Android, of course, which again would feel just as slick as the
software the Essential Phone ran. Full specs of the OSOM OV1 will be revealed
at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February and a release is expected
sometime this summer. Currently, the device is at the Engineering Validation
and Testing (EVT1) stage and Keats says that the device was the best EVT1
experience of his career.
