Head of UX at Essential Leaves Company for Google

BY Chethan Rao

Published 28 Jul 2017

Essential Phone

Essential, a smartphone startup founded by ex-Googler Andy Rubin, is going through a tumultuous time even before the product is released. The company’s head of UX, Liron Damir, has apparently left Essential and joined Google to lead the Google Home design team. The Essential Phone, as it is known, packs a pretty attractive hardware specs sheet, and a design to rival even the best in the industry.

This is the third major executive departure from Essential after Brian Wallace, VP of marketing and Andy Fouché, head of communications left the company. It is quite unusual for three top level employees to leave the company before the product has even been launched.

The Essential Phone has a lot of critical hardware attributes, and the camera is one area where the company expects to leave a mark on the industry. The dual-camera on the back of the Essential Phone consists of a monochrome and a standard color sensor. This particular arrangement has been used by multiple manufacturers, primarily Huawei, with its Leica branded sensors.

The company talks about the engineering behind the camera sensors on its blog “The Essential Phone camera is made up of two cameras that work in tandem with one another. The first rear-camera is designed for color, and like most cameras, it applies a red, green, or blue color filter at different pixel locations, and then assigns that pixel a value. As a result, the camera must interpolate the neighboring pixels to produce the final image.”

The company recently mentioned that the Essential Phone will start shipping in a few weeks. The handset was announced a couple of months ago for $699.

[Via Variety, Essential Blog]