That's all folks! Thanks so much for watching and reading with us!
People clapped for that!
Ha he's created a walt@essential.com email. If code attendees email it, they're getting a free phone.
We're wrapping up, but Rubin wants to say some nice things to Walt about retiring.
Except....Rubin now saying a few words about Walt's retirement.
And that's a wrap.
A question from Mashable about the design decision of the selfie camera. Rubin says it's in a place where he knows that on Android the notifications grow inward, both static and dynamic ones, so you actually don't lose any real estate. Also: 19x10 display.
I wonder if "open source" means other phone makers can use it!
Rubin says he thinks he needs to lead the way a little bit when it comes to the mods. Will probably build the first five or six accessories. "One of the things I read is about dongles and headphone jacks and SD cards ... and this solves that." Hmm....
Dieter asks about modularity. Aside from open sourcing it, how are you going to incentivize makers to make the stuff?
Btw, Dieter has gotten in line to ask Rubin a question so I'm live-blogging for now. GO DIETER GO.
Rubin also says they'll sell on web first. "We're at an interesting time with regards to distribution." About 30 percent of sales come from online, rest from carriers and other channels.
So winning the hearts and minds of consumers by building innovative products is first goal, Rubin says. If I win: profits will come.
Everything in a smartphone has gotten cheaper, Rubin says, in response to a Q from CNBC's Jon Fortt. The success of the industry has driven down prices.
Question time! Josh Topolsky asks about the funding for the company. Rubin says it's well funded, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He won't say how many phones he needs to sell but thinks he can get to a good business very quickly.
"It has to be a swing for the fences."
"This company is going for it like the biggest way you can go for it."
Rubin claims being a small company means he can move more quickly, so he can get stuff that bigger companies can't do because they're too big, like making crazy materials.
"I think Samsung and Apple combined are like 40 percent of the industry." He seems very not worried about it.
He also says he doesn't need to "crack the duopoly,' as Walt put it.
Within 30 days, Rubin says.
The phone goes on sale "soon."
You don't need the Essential Phone to make other Essential products work.
"I think we have a solution for that. I think we have a better plan." but he doesn't want to describe it beyond it being "more of a managed service on the back end."
"You are describing all of Android's strengths," Rubin quips. And then implies Apple doesn't get above 60 to 70 percent upgrades. Walt presses, Android is not even at 30 percent on the most recent updates.
But what about fragmentation, Walt wonders. It is a very fair question.
Rubin will open source Ambient OS and the interface for his accessory system.
Those companies trying to get everybody to use the same ecosystem in their home: "Everybody that's pursuing that strategy is going to fail."
Bye.
Lauren.
Rubin's talking about Samsung's SmartThings ecosystem. He's also not eager to take the explosion joke Walt offered up to him. Fair.
Do you think Essential will bring out Sia at its launch event to perform ... wait for it... Titanium?
(Will see! Sonos also has this crazy dream, that anybody can put their assistant on their speakers.)
Rubin doesn't want to force users to switch assistants to use his product. He wants to interoperate with them all.
"Thank you for not counting Bixby." Burrrn.
"I'm going to offer to support" every assistant. He's also going to have his own assistant.
There is a certain amount of irony in introducing a new phone and smart home puck to solve the issues of device fatigue, of too many devices and too many different UI's.
Anyway, he thinks speech is bad for output -- sometimes you just need a darn screen. "A multimodal UI is pretty important here."
Rubin says that speech is "a great input method" and asked Alexa to order 100,000 baseballs. That is a lot of baseballs.
Ha! Rubin says "I won that business," referring to trying to create a winning ecosystem. (that would be Android, which is used by 2 billion people monthly).
Basically instead of trying to win the home system, Rubin is hoping to abstract above them.
Most of the sentiment among tech types about Rubin's plans on Twitter right now is pretty negative. Building a new consumer electronics brand seems like an insanely daunting prospect at the moment.
"You have to solve the UI for the home as an interoperability and UI issue."
But really he's making a point: there are too many different user interfaces for smart home stuff.
Rubin says "there's too many things you have to interact with in your home." I agree. I've got cupboards and chairs and and even a dishwasher #humblebrag
Moving on to the Essential Home, which is a home assistant speaker thing with a big round screen.
So hey, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Alexa are about to get a new friend.
We're talking about distracted driving now? It's not very clear - apparently this new phone "has a lot of technology" and involves some kind of "assistant" that runs both in the home and on the phone.
He doesn't see a need to put that OS on a phone for now.
"Would you rather me write my own UI and ..." Rubin asks. Ambient OS is for the home, not the phone.
"It is stock Android," Rubin says.
Walt is asking about Android - Rubin himself said that it was one of the reasons that technology is over complicated. But why, then, does this phone run Android?
Three things I want from my phone right now: 1. Better battery life 2. Much faster processing 3. Smarter AI. Personally not clamoring for 360 camera on phone (yet)
It all gets bundled in flagship phones like the S8, Rubin says. But Rubin hopes the accessories will mean tech innovation can happen faster, since it'll be cheaper.
We're talking upgrade cycles now, everybody who wants a smartphone has one. So innovation is happening on a different cycle than it used to.
It's kind of amazing that the founder of Android says he doesn't like any Android phones.
Rubin says no - but it does have "Google stuff," of course.
The phone is selling for $699 - a "fully specced" phone, Rubin says. Walt asks if there will be "any craplets."
Rubin is playing around with the 360 video, panning around the scene in real time.
Here's the patent filing for the wireless accessory bus, in case you really want to nerd out.
No app installs are required, he says.
Rubin calls it "the world's smallest high quality" 360 camera. It doesn't have radios or batteries, the phone provides it.
Now we're looking at the 360 camera. It's very small!
(BTW, a lot of this is a more realistic version of what Project Ara was trying to do. Modules that could attach to anything, wireless data bus)
They can't redesign that phone, because new mods wouldn't fit. Because the Essential Phone uses a wireless system, they could design their phone however they want. Or they could take an accessory for the phone and attach it to another device, like the home assistant.
Walt wants to get to the next hardware, but Rubin wants to throw some shade at Moto Mods first.
So this accessory bus - the data gets transferred via magnets. It's wireless USB 3.0. The pogo pins are just there to provide power.
(Guess whether or not there's a 3.5mm headphone jack on this phone.)
"Connectors are dumb," Rubin says. He wants to get rid of them entirely and "make all connectors wireless."
The Accessory Bus is the new Magic School Bus
Before we get into the pogo pins on the back of the phone, we're telling a story about 30-pin connectors in hotel rooms.
The ceramic allows Essential to "do cool stuff with the accessory bus." That's code for a modular ecosystem.
It's important to note that from a distance of 20 feet, which is where I'm sitting, the Essential Phone looks indistinguishable from any iPhone or premium Android phone. Selling these things at $700 a pop is going to be a very tall order.
Aluminum bends more than titanium, but titanium is harder to mill. The back is ceramic, and there will be a matte version as well.
Rubin thinks it's the first phone made out of titanium.
(Pics incoming, btw)
Rubin points out that the whole darn industry is going bezel-less.
It's a 5.65 inch screen, but in a smallish form factor.
It is a phone, and it has that crazy screen that wraps around the front facing camera.
Okay, time to see the phone!
(Walt brought up webOS because he knows I'm in the audience. Love ya Walt!)
Dieter I'm sorry Walt just said "webOs was not successful" in front of you.
Lot of stuff they're working on : a phone, a home speaker type thing, and a new OS.
Follow-up question: why would you name a phone Phone
Rubin just calls his phone "the Phone." Not the "Essential Phone." At least he uses "the."
Rubin gave Softbank's Masa a noogie, so it was apparently an amicable separation.
Ah yes the famous Andy Rubin noogie of goodwill
Anyway, that long history made it seem like Softbank would have been a good match. But the fund Softbank was raising to invest in various tech ended up in a weird financial conflict that would have given a rando company too much ownership of Essential, so they killed the deal.
"Softbank was the first investor in Danger," (Holla Sidekick!)
Walt brings up the Softbank investment ($100 million!) that went a little sour before we get to the gadgets.
Rubin sees a lot of pitches, but what he's looking for is what people aren't thinking to pitch to him. If it's a good idea that he can build, he'll do it. That's Essential, his new company.
It's "70 percent" hardware over there.
Moving on to Rubin's new companies. So Playground is a venture fund for startups, but it is also a studio where companies can go and design products.
I wish Rubin would have said more about what he did during that year working on Google robots. It's all very mysterious.
"Self driving cars" are likely to be the first robots people will interact with, Rubin says.
Walt: What happened to the robot stuff at Google?
Machines can communicate much faster. "The technical architecture of AI is superior, in a lot of ways," to how human communication is architected.
Rubin is straight up talking about the limited bandwidth we experience when two human brains try to communicate.
So his phone is built around machine learning and AI, he says.
"What's post mobile?"
For Rubin, there's a progression of computing through user interfaces and computing - GUI -> Internet -> Mobile -> ....?
It it just me or does Andy Rubin strongly resemble Gavin Belson on "Silicon Valley"?
He had settled on robotics at Google for about a year until he got "wanderlust a little bit."
"It was a team that invented Android," Rubin demurs to taking sole credit. But he needed something to do next.
Before we get into the new announcements, we're going to talk about Playground, one of Rubin's companies.
Walt notes that his last column was about "Ambient computing" and it just so happens Rubin's new OS is called Ambient.
Walt is coming on stage now to introduce Andy Rubin, who joins to the tune of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots."
This next talk promises to be absolutely .... Essential.
(I am very glad I don't have to try to liveblog Andreessen's interview with Kara Swisher. Because he talks very fast.)
(We're into Q&A time for Andreessen and Hoffman, so the liveblog should begin in earnest in 10 or 15 minutes.)
We'll be starting soonish, but the conversation with Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman is still ongoing (and it's really good — there's a hashtag on Twitter with lots of quotes: #codecon ).
Also, while we wait I'll remind you that photography today will be brought to us by Asa Mathat, follow him on Twitter!
Earlier today, Steve Ballmer talked about his government data project and how he'll work to avoid politicizing the numbers.
Hey there! You're a little bit early. We are expecting Andy Rubin to take the stage with Walt Mossberg at 6pm PT. In the meanwhile, we have all the Essential news in our Storystream (pun not intended).
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