NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 07: Founder and CEO of Essential Products Andy Rubin speaks onstage at WIRED Business Conference presented by Visa at Spring Studios on June 7, 2017 in New York City. Its Amazon Prime day and one of the biggest discounts that are available is on the Essential Phone in Halo Gray coming in at $250 (see here) just 35% of what it was selling for just one year ago. Adding this deeply discounted product to the news that the company Essential Products Inc, is up for sale is a further indication that the ecosystem that Andy Rubin was going to build has failed badly. The focus has now switched to the smart home but without a smartphone, the ecosystem has almost zero chance. Essential Products' long-term strategy is to build a hardware-based ecosystem of devices which would offer better and smarter access to the Digital Life services that are used every day.