After a rocky road to get from device leaks and teasers to announcement and finally to taking actual orders, the team at Essential is working to prove to customers and the market that they can in fact keep up with the speed of the smartphone market and consumer expectations. Essential has already promised to make Android Oreo available on their Essential smartphone before the end of the year. Now the company is rolling out a new system build to support improvements to the camera.
In announcing the update to the camera, Essential says they are working on improvements to the camera in response to feedback they received from users. This round of updates is meant to improve latency, reliability and performance of the camera, although some new capabilities were thrown in as well.
In terms of improvements, one of the big moves was to boost the speed between a button press and actually capturing an image. This has dropped below one second, which Essential says is more than a 40% improvement. Essential also says they improved “brightness and performance in low-light” although they are not specific about exactly how they were improved.
As far as new capabilities, Essential says the camera now supports spatial sound when users are capturing 360 videos. Users will also find the volume up and down buttons can now be used as shutter buttons in 360 mode. Finally, a countdown timer was added to the 360 mode.
Along with the changes noted above, Essential says the update includes the typical bug fixes and “overall reliability improvements.” In the future, Esssential has more updates planned for the camera including a Portrait mode, a Pro Mode, animated 360 mode stills and filters, live streaming of 360 video on Facebook and Periscope, and some HDR improvements.
Essential phone owners need to get the NMI81C system update for their phone first, which Essential started rolling out on October 4th. Once that is installed, they can head over to the Google Play Store to grab the update for the camera app.
source: Essential
