Essential Phone joins the portrait mode photo party

The Essential Phone's camera was one of its bigger weak spots at launch. A few months (and a handful of updates) later and things have gotten better. The latest patch adds a portrait mode along with an exposure compensation control. As Android Police notes, the patch also includes a tweak to the device's JPEG compression algorithm that'll hopefully boost image quality, along with the usual stability fixes.

These new features were announced when the speed-focused patch was released in October. At least Essential recognizes that its camera is far from perfect and seems intent to keep tweaking things until they're right, though. You can judge the results of today's patch for yourself below.