Essential has struggled to keep things in order during its first year of operation, missing a promised shipping date, losing executives, leaking private details of customers, and more. But over the past few months, the firm has started to turn the tide by lowering the price of the device and also offering a more open approach through its bi-weekly Reddit AMAs.
So far, the AMAs have yielded details about issues, fixes, and what"s coming next. This week"s AMA is no different, giving those curious a look at what"s to come. Perhaps the most interesting features that will arrive to the handset sometime in the future is the ability to double tap the screen to wake it and also the addition of electronic image stabilization (EIS) when recording video. The team is looking into an immersive video mode for YouTube and also fixing the volume on the lowest setting as it was found to be loud by some and even the internal QA team.
As far as the next step in the Android 8.0 Oreo beta, the team did have a build ready for release this past Monday, but found some issues, requiring Essential to push back the update for some time early next week. Those that are currently using the beta build will be able to update over-the-air when the new version is released.
While there have been a lot of ups and downs, it appears that the company is determined to right the ship. It will be interesting to see how it keeps the momentum going, and what it has planned for 2018. Although there are probably several months before the release of its next handset, company watchers hope to find out how much it has learned from the launch of its first product and to see how many of those mistakes it can correct, because the sooner they can fix things, the faster they will be able to really start competing with the larger companies like Samsung, LG and others.
Source: Reddit via Android Authority