Essential Phone will gain double tap to wake, EIS, and more features in future updates

The team behind the Essential Phone has been good with giving its customers a lot of contact and feedback with its regular bi-weekly AMA sessions on Reddit. The latest such session was held this week and Essential team members confirmed it was working on a number of new features that will be rolled out in future updates.

Team members confirmed that two new features, double-tap to wake and EIS (electronic image stabilization), are on the roadmaps for future updates, but a specific release date was not mentioned. However, the second public beta for its Android 8.0 Oreo update is now scheduled to be released sometime early next week. Users who manually downloaded the first Oreo beta will be able to get the second beta build via an over-the-air update.

Essential team members also confirmed that support for Project Treble will likely be available for the final Android 8.1 Oreo update, saying, ” . . . we are getting pretty close.” Project Treble is supposed to make updating Android easier for phone makers by separating the OS from the vendor hardware code. However, not all phone makers who update to Oreo will support Project Treble, as we have seen with OnePlus’ decision not to implement it with the new OnePlus 5T.

You can check out the entire Essential Phone AMA at Reddit. One note is that the company will take a holiday break from these sessions for the rest of the year, but will be back with a new AMA event in early 2018.