Essential Phone Will Support EIS For Recording Videos, Double Tap To Wake

Essential Products Inc. held its bi-weekly Reddit AMA yesterday and officials from the company gave users an update on what’s to come. The company revealed the Essential Phone new features are on the way, including electronic image stabilization when capturing videos.

“We do have EIS video stabilization on the feature roadmap but haven’t locked down the ETE on when we will deliver,” an Essential software product manager replied during the AMA. “Good to hear though that you are asking about it, I'll make sure to pass on to our marketing team that redditers are asking for it so we can prioritize in line with our other camera features.

Another feature that is set to arrive for the Essential Phone is double tap to wake functionality. The feature allows users to simply double tap on the screen to wake the phone up or put it back to sleep. The double tap to wake feature is in Essential’s backlog of future software features, but the company didn’t give out a timeframe for when it will become available.

The Essential Phone has been having some screen jittering when users scroll on the display. The problem has been present on the Essential Phone ever since it was released. The company once again addressed the issue and said that was a fix was on the way, but it might take some more time.

“We are working diligently on it. As we mentioned in our previous AMAs it's a challenging issue to resolve given our touch panel HW 60hz sample rate,” Essential said. “Because of this, there are trade offs in software we are investigating to improve latency without affecting overall touch performance. We want to make sure we get this right and not introduce new touch problems with a hasty fix but I can assure you it's an issues our engineering and touch partners are working with us daily to resolve.”

Another issue that was brought up during the Reddit AMA session was the roll out of the second version of Android 8.0 Oreo beta for the Essential Phone. Essential was supposed to release it last week but it was delayed, as pointed out by Android Central.

Essential said it already has an Oreo Beta 2 candidate build that was ready to be released this past Monday. However, the company encountered “a few regressions” that required them to build a new candidate. The Android Oreo Beta 2 for the Essential Phone should arrive sometime early next week, that is of course if it passes through tests.

Speaking of Android Oreo, Essential also confirmed that it’s aiming to fully support Google’s Project Treble for Android 8.1. If the Essential Phone ends up fully supporting Project Treble, the device would be able to receive faster OTA software updates for Android moving forward.

The Essential PH-1, or the Essential Phone, began shipping to customers in mid-August after a series of delays. The device was mostly received well, but it faced a lot of problems. The handset arrived with a premium price tag of $699, but its price has since been slashed down to $400-$500, according to Phone Arena.