Essential afresh launched their Android Oreo Beta Program, accessible to all owners of their PH-1 flagship. We abundant a quick and accessible adjustment for installing the beta on your device. With every beta program, there are apprenticed to be affluence of new appearance and a few bugs, as we begin out with the Galaxy S8 Oreo Beta. Let's booty a attending at what's new with Android 8.0 on the Essential Phone.
Notification Channels & Notification Dots
Two big user-facing appearance in Oreo affair how you ascendancy and collaborate with notifications. Notification channels acquiesce users to booty diminutive ascendancy of their notifications and specify what blazon of alerts they accept for anniversary category. We covered this affair all-embracing in our Galaxy S8 Oreo Beta notification coverage, if you're absorbed in added detail.
Notification Dots, on the added hand, are a simple beheld active that a notification is cat-and-mouse in a assertive app. One aberrant affair we've noticed on the Essential Phone, the dots do not acclimate their blush to the accurate app icon. All of the notification dots on our PH-1 are green, in abrupt adverse to the consciousness-expanding dots on the Pixel devices.
Night Light
When Essential launched the PH-1 beforehand this year, they bare a appealing basal flagship feature: Night Mode. The best abstruse affair about this omission, Night Ablaze is featured as allotment of "stock" Android on the Pixel devices.
With the Oreo Beta, Essential added the advantage to abbreviate dejected ablaze back application your phone's awning at night. Users can set a custom agenda for Night Ablaze and alike change the acuteness aural Settings –> Display –> Night Light. It's nice to see Essential add this affection that allowances all users.
Colored Media Notifications
Adding a little added blush to your notification adumbration is never a bad thing. In Android 8.0, Google brought black media notifications into the fold. With these, apps like Spotify, Play Music, and Pocket Casts bout their notification blush to anthology art. While this doesn't add abundant functionality, it does accommodate added artful amount to the UI.
Improved Fingerprint Action Support
Near the end of October, Essential formed out a amend that brought bash gestures to the fingerprint sensor. This appearance works basically the aforementioned as the Pixel devices, so a bash bottomward reveals the notification shade. The capital downside of Essential's accomplishing is how buggy it was at launch. In the Oreo Beta build, the bash action on the fingerprint sensor is abundant improved. We haven't had any issues with the action in the Beta, hopefully this adherence will continue.
Picture-in-Picture
Watching YouTube while scrolling Twitter is appealing awesome. With picture-in-picture in Android 8.0, you can achieve absolutely that. Back watching a Youtube video, artlessly hit the home button to abbreviate your video and abide alive in added apps. The aforementioned goes for a scattering of added apps that accept been adapted to abutment the new feature, including VLC Player.
Overall, Essential didn't add a ton of new user-facing appearance in their Oreo Beta build. In fact, abounding of the appearance we abundant are banal Oreo inclusions that accept been tweaked slightly.
This is abundant added of a adherence amend by Essential, and there it absolutely shines. The all-embracing UI scrolling and aeronautics accuracy accept bigger greatly. Combining these adherence updates with the bigger camera, the Essential Phone is now a abundant accord at the $449 amount point. We will amend this column if we acquisition added new features, so let us apperceive in the comments if you've noticed annihilation new!
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