That's probably what I'm doing differently. I've never tried activating the shutter this way. I'm not sure why I hadn't tried though. Maybe because it auto-focuses without having to touch the screen, I expected it to capture immediately when pressed for the first time.

The quality of images still sucks compared to every compact I've used, but if I can speed up the acquisition time that will at the very least help alleviate subject blur as I'll be able to better anticipate what will be captured.