The Essential PH-1 is now finally supporting pinch-to-zoom functionality in YouTube app. The Essential PH-1 comes with a 5.71-inch display, and a display aspect ratio of 16:10, and up until now, regular 16:9 video had black bars on the Essential PH-1, as YouTube’s pinch-to-zoom functionality was not supported. That has just changed, as a Reddit user, osikiri, discovered that pinch-to-zoom started to working in the YouTube app on his Essential PH-1 handset.
Now, osikiri is running Android 9 Pie on his Essential PH-1, and an official version of it as well, as the Essential PH-1 received Android 9 Pie as soon as Google started rolling it out, basically. That being said, the user has YouTube v13.34.50 installed on this device, though that does not mean that it will work for you if you have that version of YouTube installed, as it’s possible that Google started rolling out this feature with a server-side change. That being said, some Reddit users suggested that uninstalling YouTube, updating it, and then clearing the cache forced the activation of pinch-to-zoom functionality for them, so if it doesn’t work for you, that’s something you can try in order to force the feature to become available.
The Essential PH-1 was announced way back in May 2017, and since then, the phone got discounted a number of times, it was even available for $250 for a short period of time recently. This handset actually comes with extremely thin bezels, and premium build materials, not to mention that its specifications are still quite powerful. The Essential PH-1 is fueled by the Snapdragon 835 64-bit octa-core processor, while the phone sports 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The device sports a 5.71-inch 2560 x 1312 display, and a 3,040mAh battery which is not removable. If you’d like to know more about the Essential PH-1, click here.