Checking out the OnePlus One

The CyanogenMod Android-based firmware for mobile phones has been around for five years or so now; we have looked at various versions along the way, most recently 11.0 M6 back in May. But within the last year, CyanogenMod (CM) has grown from its roots as a replacement firmware to actually being pre-installed—it now ships on the OnePlus One phone. The phones are only available for purchase by invitation (or via a Black Friday sale), but we were able to get our hands on one. Overall, the One makes for a nice showcase, both of CM's capabilities and the hardware designers at OnePlus.

Most everything about the phone is big—its dimensions, processor, memory, battery life, and screen are all oversized, seemingly—but its price is toward the low end. For around $350 you can get a phone with a Snapdragon 801 2.5 GHz quad-core CPU, 3G of RAM, 64G of storage, a 5.5-inch (14cm) 1920x1080 display, and a 3100mAh battery. The phone is noticeably bigger than my Galaxy Nexus that it replaced, but somehow doesn't seem too big. The weight is perfectly manageable, coming in at 5.7 ounces (162g). The battery life has been nothing short of phenomenal—it goes for several (four or five) days between charges with moderate usage—though it does seem to take quite some time to recharge (six or more hours). In addition, the construction seems solid, though I have thankfully avoided a drop test so far.

The phone runs CM 11S—a customized and expanded version of the "standard" CM 11.0, which is based on Android 4.4 (KitKat). The One and its software come from a partnership between OnePlus and Cyanogen Inc.. Interestingly, OnePlus also made some arrangement with Google so that the standard apps (e.g. Maps, Play store, etc.) are shipped with the phone, rather than requiring a separate download as is the case for installing CM on phones. OnePlus has committed to continue updating the phone software for two years; the first over-the-air update for the One came within a few days of receiving the device.

The standard theme is rather square—sparse—with icons and other elements that have simple images and sharp 90° corners. It is an interesting choice, if a little hard to get used to at first. The CM hexagon also appears: in the boot animation and "please wait" spinner, for example. All of that can be changed, of course, with various free and fairly inexpensive themes available for the phone. For anyone familiar with using Android, the One is, unsurprisingly, easy to use. There are differences from Android and CM, of course, but they largely show up in the margins—settings in particular.

One of the more obvious differences is in the camera hardware and app. That combination provides many more shooting "modes" than other phone cameras I have used: things like high dynamic range (HDR), raw, posterize, sepia, and "clear image", which combines ten separate images into the final output image to produce more detail with less noise. In addition, the Gallery app shows 15 images (seen below at right) with different characteristics (though it is a bit unclear what, exactly, they represent) for editing purposes.

The sensor for the rear-facing camera is 13 megapixels—oversized for a phone, once again—while the front-facing camera is 5 megapixels. The main (rear-facing) camera has six lenses and an f/2.0 aperture for low-light picture taking. I am no photography expert (as my photos here and elsewhere will attest), but there appear to be lots of things to try out with this highly portable, "always present" camera in the coming years.

As with all CM releases, it is the customization possibilities that really set it apart. The lock screen can be modified in various ways to provide shortcuts for functions like the camera or to start apps like the Chrome browser, phone, or text messaging. In addition, functions can activated with gestures on the blank sleeping screen: "V" for the flashlight or a circle for the camera. Those can be individually enabled and disabled, though adding your own custom gestures ("M" for maps?) might make a nice addition.

The "Profiles" feature is likely to be useful to many. One can associate a trigger, which is a particular WiFi network (by SSID) or near-field communication (NFC) tag, with a profile. Multiple preferences can be set automatically when the trigger is encountered. So, for instance, connecting to the home network might turn off the lock screen, disable mobile data, and enable data syncing. Connecting to the work network might, instead, ratchet up the security settings. There are a wide array of features that can be configured for each profile.

Privacy Guard provides lots of control over the permissions that are granted to apps installed on the system. As was the case in our CM 11.0 M6 review, though, disallowing network access on a per-app basis is not one of the options. Disabling network access (thus, ads) might well annoy app developers (and Google itself), but there are controls to configure almost any other permission that was granted at install time. In addition, there is a wealth of information about which permissions have actually been used by each app and how recently, which should make it easier to determine which apps are sneaking around behind the owner's back—and lock them down.

The owner can unlock the bootloader in the usual way using the following command:

    $ fastboot oem unlock

As a debut, both for OnePlus and for pre-installed CyanogenMod, the One makes quite an impression. How, exactly, either of the two companies is making any money at that price point is rather unclear, but that is their business—literally. If you can get your hands on an invite, it is definitely a phone worth checking out.