OnePlus co-founder acquires trademarks from Android creator Andy Rubin

Carl Pei, co-founder of OnePlus, poses with the OnePlus 2 smartphone in 2015

Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Carl Pei, the young entrepreneur who co-founded cult smartphone company OnePlus, has acquired the trademarks for a defunct next-generation handset line designed by one of the original creators of the Android operating system.

According to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office, Mr Pei’s new London-based start-up Nothing Technologies now owns the logo and branding for Essential, the doomed brainchild of Android co-founder Andy Rubin.

Mr Rubin had pitched Essential as a revolutionary advance on current smartphones, but the company folded last year after delays, security problems and sexual harassment allegations, denied by Mr Rubin, that helped spark widespread protests at his former employer Google.

Now the Essential name appears to belong to Mr Pei’s company, who has enigmatically promised to create technology that "fades into the background and feels like nothing". 

Online records show that trademarks for Essential and for its PH-1 handset were transferred from Mr Rubin to Mr Pei on January 6, and then immediately to Nothing Technologies. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Pei, a Swedish-Chinese businessman who was only 23 years old when he founded OnePlus, gathered a devoted following by selling feature-packed phones at less than £500. He has so far given few details about Nothing, beyond promising to "remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future".

Even so, Nothing has attracted investments from iPod inventor Tony Fadell and Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman, and early reports have suggested its first efforts will involve music and earphones.

A giant reset button 🔲 => https://t.co/0i3OgJxKXJ pic.twitter.com/MuvsmDuFVg

— Carl Pei (@getpeid) January 27, 2021

Mr Rubin was one of four men who founded Android as a software company in Palo Alto, taking the name of the company from his own nickname. After being acquired by Google in 2005, it has become the operating system for around 85pc of the world’s smartphones.

Essential’s goal was similar to Nothing’s, hoping to use artificial intelligence (AI) to make its devices "a virtual version of you" and free their users from having to constantly check their screens.

In 2018, however, it was reported that Mr Rubin had not left Google voluntarily but been quietly asked to resign after the tech giant’s human resources department upheld another employee’s accusation of sexual harassment.

Mr Rubin has strongly denied those claims, but reports of a gigantic $90m (£65m) exit package led to protests at Google offices across the world, catalysing a wave of tech employee activism that recently led to the formation of a Googlers’ trade union.