Essential, the smartphone company once helmed by Android creator Andy Rubin, might be dead, but the rest of the team behind the cult-favorite phone isn’t done yet. Recently, I had the chance to sit down and speak to Jason Keats, the CEO and founder of OSOM Products, a company spun up from Essential’s remains last year. And after a year of teasing, Keats is finally ready and willing to talk about the company’s plans. Meet the OV1: OSOM’s first smartphone.

A short teaser given to us by OSOM showing the upcoming hardware.

We don’t know many details or specs outside those immediately visible from looking at the back of the phone and some throwaway lines mentioned during our call (it has two rear cameras, it has a rear-mounted capacitive fingerprint sensor, it has a Qualcomm chipset), but OSOM tells us that it will have more information to share including full specifications at MWC in February, and the OV1 will be released sometime in the summer of 2022.

OSOM and the OV1

The OV1 name for this first phone is a throwback to the Essential PH-1. On its own, it stands for the OSOM Vault 1, but the similar name and number scheme is meant to evoke a feeling of continuity — though this isn’t a sequel. There won’t be an over-engineered modular accessory system (in Keats’s words: “Dear God, the headaches we had”), and it should skip out on the original’s cell signal woes (skip down for an explanation on that).

As always, it’s the job of a creator to love their creation, but we don’t need Keats’s enthusiasm to recognize that Essential’s PH-1’s industrial design was loved by many, featuring distinctive materials like titanium and ceramic and a unique look for the time. Dave Evans, who helmed the design efforts at Essential, is also part of OSOM, and I’m told we’ll have some throwback surprises to look forward to in the OV1 when it comes to material flourishes.

The Essential PH-1

OSOM itself is an acronym, but there are two meanings to unpack. First, it highlights the company’s priorities with this new device, meaning “out of sight, out of mind,” stressing that customer privacy is its primary goal. Secondly, there’s the simple phonetics. Sound it out: OSOM is “awesome” — get it?

A privacy-first smartphone

That focus on privacy is at least partly to address one of the shortcomings Essential faced. Aside from it decline at the end of the Andy Rubin saga (and we should stress: Andy Rubin isn’t involved in OSOM at all), Keats says Essential's biggest issue was its lack of focus:

“One of the things that hurt Essential was, it wasn’t entirely clear what the point of Essential was, what we were building for, and that hurt us. Ultimately, that was probably the biggest — for all the other issues, that was probably the biggest thing that prevented us from being successful. And so we sat down and said, ‘What is something we can address?’ And we said, ‘Well, I’m really annoyed at how much my phone and other companies know what I’m doing.’”

This approach is structured with three key pillars across software, hardware, and marketing: privacy, simplicity (as in, ease of use), and choice. Backing that are three separate pieces of software OSOM has developed. Though Keats isn’t saying much about them yet, at least one is still under active development with big changes happening regularly. It's all part of the same strategy of bringing control back to customers.

“Everybody’s got stuff they just don’t want on the internet — like, I know because I travel a ton, I have a picture of my passport, my green card, my driver’s license. I have them all, and I hate knowing they’re living on Google Drive. And that Google probably has access to them. And, if something goes wrong, anyone that has access to Google has access to that…. It’s nothing nefarious, it’s nothing shady, these are just things that are important to me, and I really don’t want them out in the world.

Everybody’s got stuff like that — not necessarily photos; it’s files, it’s medical data, it’s financial data. Everything we do is around helping the user control what’s shared and what’s not shared.”

One of the examples discussed was accidentally sharing personal content like a vaccine card or passport on Instagram. Keats presents it as a problem that customers have to deal with often enough to be a concern, but it doesn’t seem like much of an issue in the real world to us. Either way, though, modifying that kind of behavior means making deep changes to how Android works, so software is key.

Running stock-like software

Of course, the phone will run Android, but we’re told there will be some customizations on top of what we’re used to — though, Keats stressed, they’re doing everything they can to keep that stock-like AOSP appearance, similar to what the Essential PH-1 delivered.

We’ll have to see how these intentions actually manifest, but OSOM’s version of Android will reportedly better let customers control what is and isn’t being shared, giving them a better idea of what apps are doing that’s “100-fold more powerful” than Android’s built-in privacy indicators. Keats promises all this while being just as easy to use and familiar to anyone who has used an Android phone, and all fitting with the normal Google-apps-on-Android experience customers expect.

One might argue: If a tiny company like OSOM can deliver these kinds of privacy-enhancing changes so easily, why hasn’t a monolith like Google done this for Android itself yet, and why haven’t other companies? Relatedly, Google has received a lot of regulatory scrutiny in recent years, likely leading to some of the new “privacy by design” features in Android 12, following a similar set of privacy-enhancing changes in Android 11 in its attempts to market privacy as a feature. And that ignores Apple’s (some argue undeserved) reputation.

The PH-1 stuck close to "stock."

In more enthusiast/developer level talk, OSOM is making some very deep modifications to Android and has worked with Google to ensure it still meets all the GMS and MADA requirements — in some cases, going back and forth with Google on particular features one by one to figure out what’s within both the letter and intent of those rules, skirting the edges of what’s possible. But, though we can anticipate a very “stock”-like look to the software, developers can expect to see some greater changes inside.

Making software is arguably harder than making hardware. There are a lot of phones out there that deliver the specs and physical design any of us would want, but fire them up, and they’re just awful to use, loaded with poorly designed apps or pointless feature duplications in a meaningless effort to differentiate. Keats had some… colorful (but not inaccurate) words to share about phones from Samsung and even Google, stressing that his approach would take both software and hardware into account. “We’re still gonna build a great flagship-grade Android phone that people who like Android will wanna buy,” he said.

The engineers at OSOM do have a lineage of delivering good software via Essential. However, they did that by making as few customizations as possible, and this sounds like it would be a new and different approach for the company. Those skills may not translate between these different kinds of goals. We may just have to wait and see.

And it’s almost ready

The upcoming OV1 recently reached the “EVT1” stage — that means it’s the first form-factor build to prove that all the parts actually work together. Usually, those early tests are a little rough around the edges and the best you can hope for is that it boots. But Keats told us this was “the best EVT1” of his career, telling his team “outside of the camera app, I could daily-drive this phone today.” On that note, OSOM is paying a lot of attention to camera performance, after what happened with Essential, “spending a lot of time and money on making sure” the camera and app are up to snuff at launch.

Initially, Keats said the OV1 might launch “at or around MWC,” but it sounds like the timeline may have shifted to Summer 2022. That’s probably not due to supply constraints, though. Keats assured us it has those relationships locked down so well, it’s actually helping other smaller manufacturers get their components. But will anyone actually buy the privacy-centric OV1? Keats thinks so.

OSOM OV1 back teaser Android Police

This is the OSOM OV1 - materials (and presumably colors) subject to change.

According to some “privacy-centric software partners” (it sounded like a VPN) that shared some high-level user data, a market exists at the scale OSOM would need. And, importantly, OSOM is a small, lean company that can get by with much smaller numbers. Keats tells us that OSOM has secured $20 million in funding and may not even seek a Series A round, depending on some near-future plans. In comparison, Essential had $300 million before it launched the PH-1.

There’s another important parallel to draw with these numbers: Nextbit. It also secured around $20 million in funding after its crowdfunding campaign and launched the Nextbit Robin with a single (arguably, more gimmicky) focus. Ultimately, it didn’t succeed, and Razer finally bought what was left of it for its seemingly since-abandoned smartphone plans.

Though OSOM is making a flagship phone and intends to sell that in the US, there’s another potential kink to consider: It’s not going to sell it at carrier stores, and the company isn’t seeking any carrier partnerships. For most manufacturers, that would be outright suicide in the postpaid market, but Keats tells us "we don’t have to sell a million units to be financially successful.” In fact, Keats says that pre-sales already nearly meet what the company was hoping for in the first year, so money isn’t an issue. In Keats’s words: “What’s the way we put it in our pitch deck — we are incredibly capital efficient.”

Even as long-time brands like LG (and arguably HTC) are dying and the smartphone market is consolidating, Keats thinks the rise in customer attention to privacy makes this the perfect time to start a new brand and deliver a new phone. Keats thinks marketing will be OSOM’s biggest challenge — it was for Essential, too, but OSOM has plans to do more.

OSOM Products also hasn’t bared all just yet. Even outside final specs, the company has a few plans it hasn’t revealed: “There is some interesting stuff coming along that is tied to our partners.”

Lastly, here are a handful of more fun facts revealed by Keats in our interview:

  • OSOM’s anniversary is on 4/20 (blaze it).
  • There “was an intent” originally for OSOM to deliver the unreleased Essential GEM phone concept, but supply chain issues prevented that from happening.
  • “We’re not doing custom silicon for Gen 1. Gen 2, the intent is to do a little more customization on the hardware.”
  • When it came to monthly security updates on the Essential PH-1, “Literally, we would get yelled at by Google for being too fast… they would then say, ‘We will not allow you to push your update until the Pixel team is ready.’”
  • “We would be the first Canadian cell phone since Blackberry” — OSOM is registered in Quebec.
  • The Essential PH-1’s cell signal woes were apparently caused by a requirement imposed by Rubin to have one worldwide SKU, but targeting the Japanese market (and therefore Japanese frequencies) proved problematic.

At launch, the OV1 will be available in the US, Canada, and a handful of countries in Europe.