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Essential Raises $300M

bloomberg.com

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Re: Essential Raises $300M

#41

Post by pawadu »

_pmf_ wrote: post #38
htormey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically the reason this thing gets $300 million is because Andy Rubin is at the helm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin His track record is amazing (Danger/Android). I agree 100% with everything you have said but I'm willing to see where this goes based solely on his reputation. Surely their is something more to this than just building a high end Android phone with a little privacy tech thrown in.

> His track record is amazing (Danger/Android). Let's not fool ourselves: Android gained momentum because it was what was there when Google needed it; it's not a particularly well engineered or cohesive system. Everything down to the very basics is rushed and haphazardly thrown together, and I cannot see any improvement (Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-th…

> Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-the-Language, but the fact that this came from a 3rd party is pretty telling

Android is open, most good ideas come from the community. The fact that Google chose Kotlin over Go shows that there is very little politics in Android, the best technology often wins.

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#42

Post by pawadu »

prostoalex wrote: post #32
vqc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe investor expectation is that a company like HTC or LG or some other none-Samsung/Apple/Google/Amazon company will buy Essential in order to get a strong team that is building a suite of products that tries to compete with Samsung/Apple/Google/Amazon. Can that justify the valuation?

Just like Microsoft's acquisition of Danger established Microsoft as a power player.

Technically, it could have. Windows Phone 7.0 was a wonderful experience, dare I say, significantly better than what Android and iOS at that time.

Then Microsoft went ahead and shot itself in the foot, hang himself from the ceiling, commit harakiri, burned down the house and then jumped down a bridge.

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#44

Post by wastedhours »

stormbeta wrote: post #30
jpm_sd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, what is the benefit of a "bezel-less" phone? I always put cases on my phones, ever since I dropped one and spider-webbed the screen some years back. Without a bezel, the case will be covering up part of the screen...

Agreed. Modern phones are so fragile as to make cases mandatory for anyone that doesn't just sit around all day, and bezel-less designs make it even worse while adding zero practical value.

Fortunately there's a rather large portion of the population (myself included for 75% of the time) who do rarely more than sit around all day (staring at some form of screen or another).

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#45

Post by wastedhours »

rayuela wrote: post #3

This one honestly makes no sense to me. How is this company being valued at a Billion dollars with a flagship product that is indistinguishable in features and price from any of its competitors. Who the hell is going to gamble on a new, no name brand for a $700 product that is exactly like the very reputable products from Apple, Samsung, and 50 other phone manufacturers?!?

Somewhat flippantly: they bought the domain name. The investment is in a hardware/software services brand with a founder with expert experience of the field - the phone is a 0.1 product for the company.

The wider vision will be an (assuming) quick roll out of assorted smart home/business tech built around the "Essential" brand, with a nice proprietary software layer linking it all up.

With his experience, I highly doubt anything he creates at this point would be acquired for much less than $300m (in this day and age, a $300m acquihire doesn't seem so out of reach...), so if they have participation preferred, might not even lose out.

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#46

Post by pawadu »

prostoalex wrote: post #34
notfried wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Rubin's end-game is to do a fork of Android that would break away reliance on Google and then be acquired by Samsung for a few billions.

> that would break away reliance on Google There are substitutes for Search, Gmail, Apps Suite and Chrome, but the rest of the basic services are not that easy to replace. Maps with turn-by-turn directions, Google Translate, Google Photos with unlimited backup are all essentials for mobile consumers nowadays.

I actually think maps is the easiest to replace. We have bing maps, HERE, waze and multiple open source projects.

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#47

Post by pawadu »

eldavido wrote: post #16

Longtime Android user here. I would love to see this company succeed, but I don't see how it's possible. Even if you can design a better phone, Apple has two massive moats protecting them, namely, iOS and their manufacturing prowess. The investors in this are going to take a bath. Again, this isn't the outcome I want, but I think it's the outcome we'll get.

I don't know... I didn't expect OnePlus to survive long either and yet here I am three years later seriously thinking of switching to Android and OnePlus 5.

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#48

Post by mixedbit »

_pmf_ wrote: post #37
mixedbit wrote: post #36

I believe there is a space on the smartphone market for a new powerful player. Today there are two mainstream choices iPhone and Android. A significant portion of iPhone users are devoted fans, but Android is more often just a practical choice. The first Essential phone is just another Android device, but based on the investment and people involved I don't think this is a long term plan. If Essential releases a devic…

> If Essential releases a device that is clearly distinguishable from Android phones, they may win many Android users. I don't know. HTC had some really high build quality models; did not do them much good (haptically, those were the best of their time). With Google beginning to crack down on vendors mangling the Android OS (part of the unified update strategy), differentiation from Android will be even more difficul…

Software differentiation would more important and easier than hardware, so Android fork or completely new OS that could maybe support Android apps.

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#49

Post by rubber_duck »

pawadu wrote: post #41
_pmf_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His track record is amazing (Danger/Android). Let's not fool ourselves: Android gained momentum because it was what was there when Google needed it; it's not a particularly well engineered or cohesive system. Everything down to the very basics is rushed and haphazardly thrown together, and I cannot see any improvement (Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-th…

> Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-the-Language, but the fact that this came from a 3rd party is pretty telling Android is open, most good ideas come from the community. The fact that Google chose Kotlin over Go shows that there is very little politics in Android, the best technology often wins.

>The fact that Google chose Kotlin over Go shows that there is very little politics in Android, the best technology often wins.

In what world is Go a realistic consideration in this discussion ? Android is built on top of a JVM - Go is a native language with no JVM access. Not to mention it has nothing to do with Go target domain.

Google already has an alternative mobile OS with Fuchsia and the front-end Flutter stack is built on their Dart language which can be viewed as a Java alternative without the JVM. Kotlin is the only practical alternative to Java on Android because of technical reasons (Scala stdlib is too big and the compile time ends up being too painful) - but I don't see how it has anything to do with the legal aspect (the entire platform is still built on top of JVM and tons of Java code).

Re: Essential Raises $300M

#50

Post by Eridrus »

threeseed wrote: post #14
rayuela wrote: post #3

This one honestly makes no sense to me. How is this company being valued at a Billion dollars with a flagship product that is indistinguishable in features and price from any of its competitors. Who the hell is going to gamble on a new, no name brand for a $700 product that is exactly like the very reputable products from Apple, Samsung, and 50 other phone manufacturers?!?

Because product sales are likely to be irrelevant. Think of this company as a future acquihire for someone like LG who needs a better flagship phone or for companies who wish to have an experienced, design-savvy team capable of delivering on IoT and mobile products. Or there is even a free letter over in the Alphabet company for an in-house hardware player comparable to Microsoft's Surface strategy.

I don't think Alphabet is keen on having him back after what he did with Replicant.
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