No matter what you think about the Essential Phone, one area that it dominates all other Android OEMs at (aside from Google, of course) is with its software updates. Less than a month after launching a beta for Android 8.1 Oreo, Essential's now pushing the software to all of its users.
This marks the first public Oreo update for the Essential Phone as Essential chose to skip 8.0 after discovering some bugs towards the end of its beta, but even so, Essential's still beating Samsung, LG, and other big players in these regards.
If you didn't jump on the Oreo beta for the Essential Phone, you'll find a lot of new toys to play with, including picture-in-picture, Android's new emoji design, a dark theme for Quick Settings that changes based on your wallpaper, Google's Autofill API for faster password entry, and way more than I have time to list here.
Essential says to "check your phone now" for the 8.1 Oreo update, and if you don't see it yet, you should be able to download and install it over the next couple of days.
If you've got an Essential Phone, what are you looking forward to the most with Android 8.1?
Essential Phone users can now join the Oreo beta with a simple OTA update
