A company sprawling out of Quebec, Canada, composed of most members from the developing team of the infamous Essential Phone, has now developed an all-new device. OSOM has come up with the OV1, a smartphone designed to prioritize user privacy over anything else.

The Essential Phone from 2017

A bit of backstory; Essential Phone was founded by Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android. The idea was to have a phone with just the important bits, with a modular design sort of like the LG G5. Their first flagship, the PH-1, was released in 2017 but was discontinued and no longer followed up by succeeding models.

According to reports from XDA Developers, that team bar Rubin started up Osom (Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind), a tech company with the goal of protecting user information.

The team admitted that the Essential Phone was “rushed to market” with an underwhelming camera and buggy software. They don’t intend to make the same mistake twice with their Osom OV1 privacy smartphone. The device, according to an article by GSM Arena, has been quoted by the team to have “100-fold” security measures as compared to smartphones currently on the market. The software is optimized as well to inform users of which information exactly is being accessed at all times by applications, online servers, and other possible malicious entities.

The OSOM Vault 1 (OV1) will come rocking an undisclosed Qualcomm chipset, rear fingerprint sensor (a welcome departure from the ultrasonic options we currently have), dual rear cameras, and near-stock Android. Development is still currently going on with the phone until the target release date of summer 2022. XDA Developers mentioned that the company has secured $5.6 million in funding, so we’re quite excited to see how the OV1 will turn out. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.