eBay seller claims an Essential Home smart speaker prototype can be yours for $900

An clear prototype good speaker from defunct smartphone company Important has popped up in an eBay listing spotted by a keen-eyed Redditor. It gives a tantalizing glimpse at what the ambitious-still-unreleased “Essential Home” product could have been and looks to be partially functional. The listing’s images clearly show the device’s circular screen illuminated, with things like its lock screen and settings menus visible. The vendor is inquiring for $900 additionally shipping and delivery for the prototype.

If you have no memory of the Crucial Property then we wouldn’t blame you. The sensible speaker was introduced in Might 2017 along with the Important Cellular phone, and the corporation informed Wired that it hoped to ship the two later that summer season. The cellphone would eventually launch in August, but the smart speaker was nowhere to be uncovered. Vital would ultimately shut down in early 2020 just after releasing just the just one solution.

When it was introduced, the Crucial Residence was meant to convey just about every disparate wise property ecosystem together underneath a solitary umbrella a not dissimilar guarantee to what Issue is aiming to do now. It would assist touch and voice controls and could be woken with a glance. Location timers, controlling your tunes, and responding to typical interest concerns were being all pointed out as prospective options.

The important to a great deal of this features was a mysterious new operating system, termed Ambient OS, that would be in a position to bridge diverse good property devices and procedure all its facts domestically fairly than offloading it to the cloud. But the eBay listing’s photos advise that the clever speaker is essentially running some kind of Android, which implies that “Ambient OS” may perhaps have been at most effective a fork, or else just a glorified Android pores and skin.

It’s unclear how functional this prototype is or no matter if a established developer could coax anything out of it. But it seems to be like a neat trace at what could have develop into of Important, a corporation with so substantially buzz that, at a single time, it was valued at in excess of a billion pounds before it even delivered its to start with and previous phone.