Essential Phone owners, you have a small but important update rolling out to you today. The company Tweeted earlier today that build NMJ20D is rolling out to owners that fixes some vulnerabilities as well as adding a few new features.
First, before you get all excited, no, this is not bringing you Oreo. The update is only 75MB in size so this is truly an incremental update.
As for what is fixed, a fair amount. First, this build patches the KRACK WiFi vulnerability and brings the October Android Security Update patches to the phone. There are also improvements in the touch screen performance as well as overall system improvements for performance.
The big new feature, fingerprint scanner gestures.
Now on your Essential Phone, just like on the Pixel lineup, you can swipe the fingerprint scanner on the device to pull down your notification shade. It makes it easy to see what notifications you have with only one hand much easier (I wasn’t sold at first but now use this feature on my Pixel XL all the time).
The update is rolling out now and you should see it hit your PH-1 over the course of the next few days. Because it is such a small update, install time should be very quick.
