Although Essential has run into a few road bumps here and there throughout 2017, one of the company's strongest aspects is the level of transparency it has with its fans/customers. The Essential team just held its latest bi-weekly AMA on Reddit on December 13, and as a result, we've got some new details on quite a few software features and fixes that are being worked on for the Essential Phone.
Jittery scrolling has been an issue with the Essential Phone pretty much since its release, and when asked about this once again, Software Program Manager Marcus responded with:
We are working diligently on it. As we mentioned in our previous AMAs Its a challenging issue to resolve given our touch panel HW 60hz sample rate. Because of this, there are trade offs in software we are investigating to improve latency without affecting overall touch performance.
Essential had planned to roll out the second beta for Oreo 8.0 to the PH-1 last week, but that unfortunately never happened. Thankfully, we won't have to wait too much longer before it's here.
Hi There, we had an Oreo Beta 2 candidate build ready on Monday we had planned on releasing this week. However, we encountered a few regressions we caught last minute that requires us to spin another candidate. Good news is this gave us the opportunity to push in a few more fixes and if all goes well with testing Beta 2 will drop early next week.
As for other features/fixes that are in the works for the Essential Phone:
- The Essential team is collecting logs on an issue with Miracast functionality not working
- A fix for echoes that are heard when making phone calls is on the way
- Double tap to wake is currently is Essential's backlog of features, and while there's no ETA for its release, it will be coming at some point
- Essential is working on a monochrome portrait mode
- More video stabilization improvements are coming at some point
This wasn't the most exciting AMA the Essential team's ever held, but it's still nice to get information right from the horse's mouth about what we can expect for the PH-1 in the near future. If you want to read through the full AMA, you can check it out here.
Essential Phone gains portrait mode, 2nd gen model in the works, and more
