A long-delayed hands-on with Essential’s skinny Android phone

Someone obtained Essential’s unreleased smartphone that took the “candy bar” style phone a bit too far. Originally revealed in 2019 as “Project Gem,” this PH-2 looks like what you’d get from splitting an already tall Sony Xperia 1 in half. It reminds me of memes that popped up about the slightly taller 4-inch screen on the iPhone 5, as people imagined what might happen if phones just kept getting taller instead of wider.

Rob Wainwright, a software engineer who works on the Nova Launcher, says he bought the phone on eBay, and in his video, you can see the mostly operational PH-2 with card-style widgets for apps like Spotify and Uber, along with a smartwatch-style clock at the top.

Why didn’t it come out? The first Essential phone in 2017 reportedly only sold about 150,000 units, and before a follow-up could launch, reports by The Information and the New York Times surfaced disturbing details about the sexual misconduct claims surrounding company founder Andy Rubin’s departure from Google a few years earlier. Plans for the second phone were canceled, and in early 2020, Essential shut down, saying it had “no clear path to deliver” the device to customers.

The video shows off the PH-2’s tall 5.7-inch AMOLED display with 2,160 by 560 resolution and a holepunch camera in the front, while the rear has a protruding camera and a non-functional fingerprint reader. Like the PH-1, this one is also a fingerprint magnet.

While the UI is not fully complete, the video shows off the custom Android launcher that has swipe-up gestures on the bottom corners to go home or back. Many of the cards on the homescreen are essentially just web apps that, when opened, look very out of place — a YouTube video looks like a postage stamp sideways on the top, and the rest of the screen is just the description, comments, and other suggested videos.