Essential Gem hands-on video offers a rare look at this crazy prototype

Are smartphones too boring these days? Sure, foldable phones are now a reality, but even those have been around for enough generations that they’re starting to feel familiar. When’s the last time you found yourself excited by a really “weird” phone? Today we’re taking a walk down memory lane as we think about one of the most unique phone designs of the past decade, while getting to see some newly released video of this promising hardware, doomed to never see the commercial light of day.

Smartphone critics often lament the lack of players in the modern market, with only a handful of companies competing in any meaningful fashion. While true, occasionally we do see someone brave enough to step up as a new voice, as we did back in 2017 when Android co-founder Andy Rubin and his company Essential introduced the PH-1 handset. It received a decent reception, and fans wondered what might come next for the company… all the way up until it folded in 2020.

But before it did, back in 2019, Essential teased what may be the most pronounced departure from mainstream phone design we’ve seen a company take so seriously: the almost remote-control-shaped “Project Gem”.

For anyone bored with run-of-the-mill slabs, this kind of shape for a smartphone felt fresh and full of possibilities — how wonderfully pocketable! But our fun wouldn’t last, and with Essential closing its doors the following year, our chances of ever owning a Gem phone closed with them. While we’ll have to live with that disappointment, this week we get to think about what could have been, upon the publication of a rare Gem hands-on video.

Nova Launcher engineer Rob Wainwright recently shared the news of their successful eBay purchase of a Gem prototype (via 9to5Google). And because he likes all of us so much, we get an up-close look at this hardware and its in-development software.

With its 2160 × 560 screen, the phone’s display has an aspect ratio of nearly 4:1 — a solid twice as wide (or tall, orientation notwithstanding) as the most extreme smartphone screens you’ll find today. As you can see in the video, the hardware is indeed functional, even as some features are not active on this particular prototype. Understandably, the phone runs a rather custom launcher, taking advantage of this very vertical screen. This video coming to us from the source it does, we also get to see the Gem running Nova Launcher, which looks quite good considering it was never optimized for screens like this.

It looks like many apps were still in development when this prototype existed, and a lot of spots in the launcher are just holding space for future apps, but we do get a peek at some, like the phone’s camera software — and it’s just as weird as you might expect from a screen this shape. Check it all out in the video above.