Things aren't looking good for Essential, Andy Rubin's smartphone startup. After announcing it was cancelling its next smartphone earlier this year, the company will now lay off 30 percent of its staff, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Essential produced a pretty good product for its first-ever smartphone. The Essential Phone had a unique ceramic body, pioneered the notch design trend, and shipped with stock Android. Essential's update support has also been great—besides consistent monthly security updates, it delivered an update to Android 9 Pie on day one, an unheard-of speed for most Android OEMs. Essential did all this while, in the news, it seemed like a dead company and was considering a sale.

The Essential Phone ultimately wasn't competitive, though. It had flagship pricing but couldn't keep up with the competition, lacking a good camera, screen, and water resistance. Essential was also a brand-new company, and it's hard to trust a company with no track record. The phone didn't sell well, and eventually, fire sales took the price from $700 all the way down to $250.

The layoffs to Essential's 120-person staff have hit the "hardware, marketing, and sales divisions," according to Bloomberg. In an email, an Essential spokesperson called the move "a difficult decision to make. We are very sorry for the impact on our colleagues who are leaving the company and are doing everything we can to help them with their future careers." Essential apparently still isn't giving up on a future product, however. "We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game changing consumer product," the company added.

According to earlier reports, Essential cancelled the Essential Phone 2 to work on the other product in its lineup, a smart speaker. Renders showed a product that looked like an Amazon Echo Dot, but this speaker instead ran a new OS from Essential called "Ambient OS." According to another report from Bloomberg last week, the smart speaker has been "paused," and now the company is pivoting back to a smartphone. Don't imagine an "Essential Phone 2," though, according to the report; Essential felt the original phone was "too similar to others on the market."

So the new phone "isn’t like a standard smartphone" according to Bloomberg. The device will supposedly have a "small" screen and rely on voice commands and Essential's AI to do your normal smartphone tasks. Bloomberg says that "Rubin would like to capture people’s imagination with a product that’s truly different from alternatives." The company is hoping to have the phone ready to show off to industry partners at CES in January, assuming it doesn't pivot to some other product again or go out of business in the interim.