eBay vendor claims an Essential Home sensible speaker prototype could be yours for 0

An obvious prototype sensible speaker from defunct smartphone producer Essential has popped up in an eBay itemizing noticed by a keen-eyed Redditor. It affords a tantalizing glimpse at what the ambitious-yet-unreleased “Essential Home” system may have been and appears to be partially purposeful. The itemizing’s images present the system’s round display screen illuminated, with components like its lock display screen and settings menus seen. The vendor is asking for $900 plus delivery for the prototype.

If you don’t have any reminiscence of the Essential Home then we wouldn’t blame you. The sensible speaker was introduced in May 2017 alongside the Essential Phone, and the corporate told Wired that it hoped to ship each later that summer time. The cellphone would ultimately launch in August, however the sensible speaker was nowhere to be discovered. Essential would ultimately shut down in early 2020 after releasing simply the one product.

A render of the unreleased system.
Image: Essential

A settings menu displaying that the system seems to be working Android.
Image: eBay

When it was introduced, the Essential Home was meant to convey each disparate sensible residence ecosystem collectively below a single umbrella; a not dissimilar promise to what Matter is aiming to do now. It would help contact and voice controls and may very well be woken with a look. Setting timers, controlling your music, and responding to normal curiosity questions had been all talked about as potential options.

The key to plenty of this performance was a mysterious new working system, referred to as Ambient OS, that might be capable to bridge totally different sensible residence methods and course of all its knowledge regionally fairly than offloading it to the cloud. But the eBay itemizing’s images counsel that the sensible speaker is definitely working some type of Android, which suggests that “Ambient OS” might have been at greatest a fork, or else merely a glorified Android pores and skin.

It’s unclear how purposeful this prototype is or whether or not a decided developer may coax something out of it. But it appears to be like like a neat trace at what may have change into of Essential, an organization with a lot hype that, at one time, it was valued at over a billion {dollars} earlier than it even shipped its first and final cellphone.

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