Essential Phone Starts Receiving the Android 8.1 Oreo Beta; New Colour Announced

Last month, Essential announced that it would be skipping Android 8.0 update for the Essential Phone due to stability issues. As promised, the company has now started rolling out Android 8.1 Oreo beta update for the Essential Phone users.

The first beta build of Android 8.1 is currently being seeded to the users who’ve been using the beta build of Android 8.0. For others, you can download the file from Essential’s website and flash it manually on your smartphone.

Talking about the update itself, the Android 8.1 Oreo brings a handful of new features to the table. The update changelog indicates that the company has added a lot of new stuff like smart text selection, instant apps, dynamic calendar and clock icons, picture-in-picture mode, etc. In fact, the update also makes startups and app sign-in a little faster. In terms of the patches, the update contains the February security patch and slow scrolling jitter fix.

With that being said, the update file weighs in at around 500MB, so make sure you are connected to a Wi-Fi network, and you have enough storage to handle the update. And as of now, Essential has not given any confirmation on the arrival of a stable release. But considering the fact that we already have a beta build, the stable release should be right around the corner.

In other news, Essential also has a new announcement scheduled for today, i.e., February 15. Although there are reports about the company launching a new smartphone, the announcement appears to be about new color variant – Ocean Depth – of the model that’s already available to buy.