Andy Rubin’s newest creation, an AI-based smartphone meant to be the centerpiece of a new ecosystem being developed by his company Essential has made its way onto Geekbench, revealing a few details about itself along the way. The new device is billed as the “Essential FIH-PM1” and seems to sport horsepower that puts it on par with Google’s Pixel lineup, if not a bit above it. The mysterious device also runs on Android, the platform initially developed by Android Inc, a company co-founded by Rubin back in 2003. The phone is supposed to be based around a powerful AI and link with multiple devices through a customized ecosystem, which would make Android a fairly suitable platform for it.
One of the ways in which the Essential FIH-PM1 achieves this is by utilizing a unique processor variant from Qualcomm. The CPU seems to be some Snapdragon model clocked at 1.9GHz. The Geekbench listing reveals the processor fueling the Essential FIH-PM1 is slightly more powerful than the Snapdragon 820, suggesting that a Snapdragon 835 may be on board. The Essential FIH-PM1 is powered by 4GB of RAM and is running Android 7.0 Nougat, though it’s quite likely that its OS version has been heavily modified. Memory copy, latency, and bandwidth scores are all quite high, indicating that the RAM on board is extremely fast.
The fact that Rubin and his people seem to be using a variant of a processor that will start shipping in Android phones in just a few months suggests that this device and the ecosystem around it may end up on the streets a bit sooner than most industry watchers predicted. After all, if the Essential FIH-PM1 is ready for Geekbench, it may only be a few months until it’s ready for a commercial launch. The benchmark listing doesn’t reveal much more about this bezel-free device, so consumers will likely have to wait for Andy Rubin to make a full public announcement before they can learn more about the Essential FIH-PM1 that’s likely going to sport a different name once it hits the market. More information on this curious device will hopefully follow soon.
