Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus One & Cyanogenmod 12!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the oneplus one. It was a bit of an unknown phone when it first came out from a kind of an unknown company since it’s new, but when it first came out about nine months ago, i did a video review on it. I’Ve done a revisited video since then, and it seems like every time i talk about this phone got ta mention that it will basically live or die by the software by the fact that it should hopefully get software updates very quickly by cyanogen and for a while. It did cyanogen did a really good job of putting out updates, pretty constantly to fix performance and to give it new features and to address things so for a while it did a really good job in the software update department. So this guy is smoothly running cyanogenmod.
11S for a while, but then it hit a hiccup and cyanogen made some deals over here and oneplus said some things over there and eventually you know without getting into the details of it. Oneplus and cyanogen split, so they’re no longer working together. So for those of us who own this phone or were thinking about trying to buy one now what well to make a long story short now, oneplus is going to try building their own rom. So it’s going to be called oxygen. Os they’ve hired a bunch of very talented people and they’ve been working on it.
It’S going to come out sometime in march, and i’m assuming it’s going to be built on top of android 5.0 lollipop. But in that sort of a mean time, where we’re not getting any updates from cyanogenmod and we’re waiting for oxygen os to be built, i got a little bit impatient, so i went ahead and flashed the latest version of cyanogenmod 12 that is built on lollipop onto My oneplus one now i actually showed this to you guys a little earlier. Some of the steps i went through on snapchat and some of you guys. Actually a lot of you guys snapped back saying you wanted to see a video on what this was like. So it’s just a quick video on my impressions of what the experience has been like on this new os on this, not so new phone so far, so it does take a couple of steps to actually get it set up. Obviously, it won’t come with root access out the box, so i’ll leave a link to the instructions in the oneplus form that i followed right below that like button. So if you want to follow along to them, it’s really really detailed.
You can basically get it done with a windows machine and a usb cable and you’re all set to go uh but yeah without any further ado. Let’S get into it. So there are a bunch of advantages to using cyanogenmod, which is a custom rom over just the stock android that you would find on a nexus 5 or a nexus 6, or something like that and a lot of those are basically in customization or things that you Would find that you are able to change on your phone that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to change so one of those things, that’s, i guess most noteworthy on the oneplus one is the ability to switch between your on-screen and off-screen buttons. So you can choose the nav buttons to be on the phone or on the bottom. If you want them on the screen or off.
That’S your call. A lot of things like that you’ll find just buried in the settings here of cyanogenmod, and these are things that you found in cyanogenmod, 11s and they’re going to continue to move over into 12.. You can also change and add a lot of shortcuts to things.
So i have a regular swipe down from the left, just a normal swipe into your notifications, but a swipe down from the right gets you quickly into your quick settings and also pretty much all of these quick settings. You can change what shows up here and where. So if i go into the settings – and i go scroll down to my notification drawer – you can actually choose what stuff shows up in which tile i have wi-fi on location on the top two and those are the two larger ones up there. So that means these are things you can’t change if you don’t have cyanogenmod or another custom rom. Of course, you still keep all the fancy animations of swiping down and pulling down your notifications that android l has introduced. So all the material design, stuff and all of the simplicity and the beauty of android l is still here.
Of course you just get the additions depending on what you like, there’s another little one that i like up at the top in the notification bar here. You can change the way it looks and a lot of people you’ll see in this status bar have a circular battery indicator. That’S just by changing the battery style to a circle, and now you have it’s a half circle for having half battery.
I actually changed it back to the portrait icon just to keep the looks of stock android. I guess i’m boring like that. I also don’t really use any themes, although you can be much more creative than me in changing the looks of your cyanogenmod device, because there are a bunch of themes available in their own store and in the google play store too also you’ll notice. The performance is pretty snappy. In fact, i’ve noticed a lot of things moving around faster than they did on my nexus 6.. Also little things like the little weather information up here about how cold it is and being able to tap it and getting a little daily forecast from yahoo weather stuff. Like that really neat, there’s a file manager built into cyanogenmod and that’s again, something you get from root access that you don’t get in regular stock, android also stuff, like gestures from when your screen is off things, you’ll remember from saanich and mod 11s. So, for example, when your screen is off, you can draw a circle to activate the camera, and sometimes i found that this would activate in my pocket. So i didn’t use it very often, but if you’re one of those people that opens the camera all the time or needs to very quickly toggle, the flashlight you can just draw on the screen.
While the this display is off and immediately get stuff to turn on. So that’s awesome and pretty useful, so yeah, that’s basically it that’s. What i’ve found so far to be really interesting about cyanogenmod 12 on this one plus one and that’s kind of the beauty of android is, if you get impatient with something or if you really want to change something about the user interface or the feature set. You have you can just go out and do it, so that’s pretty awesome that we’ve been able to do that so far.
I’Ve also flashed the franco kernel and apparently it’s supposed to get me amazing battery life. This is only the second day. I’Ve been using it full time and it’s been pretty good so far, but i’ll leave some updates on twitter. If you guys want to follow along about my usage with that, it’s been a while, since i used a custom kernel but either way that’s been it uh.
Thank you for watching, and if you are down to try this kind of stuff on your oneplus one, it’s actually becoming a little bit more easy to buy. Apparently every tuesday at a certain time, you can buy this phone without an invite. It’S kind of still weird, but you can also still wait for phones like the htc one m9 and the galaxy s6 that are coming up right around the corner either way. You’Re called thank you for watching this video and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace. .