OnePlus One Review: Smartphone Value Redefined By A Newcomer

OnePlus is a rare beast: A startup building smartphones. Their first device is the Android-based OnePlus One, which, despite its unnecessarily repetitive name, is impressive hardware in a market where legacy device makers rule the roost and charge top dollar for smartphones packing the same kind of internals as the One. The OnePlus One is actually a remarkable deal at $299 for an unlocked device, and proof that Google isn’t the only company in town that can offer Nexus style price economics.

MSRP: $2995.5-inch, 1920×1080 display16GB storageQuad-core 2.5GHz processor with 3GB RAMLTE, 802.11ac Wi-FiProduct info page

Pros

Cheap without compromisesHighly customizable out of the box

Cons

Hulking huge designCustomization isn’t for everyone

The OnePlus One is a monolithic device; with its 5.5-inch screen, it’s firmly in the realm of what we once referred to as phablet devices (sadly the term is dying as more phones extend to larger displays). But it does at least manage to fit all that screen in a package that’s as slim as possible – the device is only around 0.35 inches thick.

It’s just a shade smaller than the Galaxy Note 3 in terms of overall footprint, but it more closely resembles the Nexus 5 in terms of its lines and the matte finish of the plastic back, which is somewhat rubberized for grip. As far as gargantuan devices go, the OnePlus One is among my favorite to hold, however, and the Nexus styling is visually appealing, too, as is the slightly protruding top and bottom metal-look lip. It manages to be one of the best looking Android phones recently launched, even if the look is a tad derivative.

The OnePlus One’s performance is unparalleled for a device in this price range, and that’s almost all that needs to be said about that. It packs as much RAM and the same kind of processor as smartphones that lead the category in terms of specs, like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One (M8) – yet it manages to do so at a fraction (more than 1/2) the price of those devices. And the specs aren’t hollow; their effect is felt in the animations of the OS and the performance of Android games and apps loaded onto the device.

There were some issues early in testing with weird visual glitches when accessing the settings and notification panel from the top bar of the home screen, but OnePlus quickly acknowledged and then zapped these issues with a software update – another of its virtues is that it can push these out without leaning on either Google or carrier partners thanks to the use of Cyanogen as its primary OS. This Android fork offers a near-stock experience in many ways, but with extensive customization options. It’s a very capable performer, too, and in many ways much better than the customized interfaces that most other Android OEMs throw down on top of Google’s mobile platform.

Speaking of Cyanogen, it provides the OnePlus One with many of its tricks, which include the ability to fully change the skin of your device with various onboard and downloadable themes. By default, the phone came with a horrible square icon reskinning of Android, but the point is that I didn’t have to live with the bad design choices of the phone’s creators; instead, I was able to swap out for a much more default KitKat look with minimal effort and no special permissions required.

OnePlus is full of such customizations, and a quick look at any Settings screen will reveal the extent to which you can modify elements including the lock screen, notification/status bar, home screens and more. The whole thing is basically a playground of tick boxes, switches, submenus and more, and that’s a very welcome thing for people who like to fuss with their phones. But for those who are content to have a device that works reliably and consistently, and presents an uncomplicated experience, this could be a bit overwhelming; most OEMs try to reduce and refine the Settings app, not complicate it further.

Still, for this reason, OnePlus’ inaugural device is something that probably appeals more to hardcore Android fans than even stock Nexus devices. It encourages playfulness and meddling, which is in the spirit of the original Android OS, before Google started slowly massaging it into more of a closed and controlled direction. Software-wise, this is the Nexus for Nexus lovers, as illogical as that may sound.

Founded 2013     Overview OnePlus is a technology startup committed to bringing the best possible technology to users around the world. Created around the mantra Never Settle, OnePlus creates beautifully designed devices with premium build quality. Founders Pete Lau Website http://oneplus.net/ Full profile for OnePlus

The OnePlus One is impressive in most regards, but the fact that it can manage to include such an effective and good-looking screen at this size in a handset at this price is perhaps most impressive of all. The 5.5-inch display has excellent color rendering, and at 404 PPI pixel density, also won’t show any pixels no matter how hard you stare at normal viewing distances.

The display seems to hover at the very top of the glass on the front of the phone, too, and renders text perfectly. It’s great for watching movies and viewing images, and if there’s a flaw to it at all, it’s that some of the assets included, like stock OS icons for the built-in flashlight and audio recorder, aren’t designed to be viewed on such a high-res display, meaning they appear slightly fuzzy and look wrong.

OnePlus One manages to do the impossible, offering up top-tier specs at mid-tier prices. It does this seemingly without sacrifices (battery life was excellent, for instance, especially when using the smartphone’s display sparingly). The camera is a decent performer, beating the Nexus 5 by a wide margin, though falling short of the Galaxy S5 and the iPhone in this department. But its flaws are small things, details that fail by matters of degrees rather than huge margins, and for a smartphone that costs less than half of many of its competitors, that’s nothing short of amazing.

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Samsung Outs Its First Tizen-Powered Smartphone

Samsung is taking another baby step away from the Android platform today, with the announcement of the first commercial smartphone powered by the open source Tizen platform, instead of Google’s Android OS.

The hardware specs of the device offer little in the way of differentiation — albeit it does include a built-in fingerprint sensor, as the Galaxy S5 did — but the Samsung Z runs Tizen 2.2.1, making it a novel beast indeed.

It’s slated to ship in Q3, initially to Russia with a plan to expand it to other unnamed markets thereafter.

The Z will include access to a Tizen app store, which means buyers can expect a few thousand native apps. However the OpenMobile application compatibility layer will enable the handset to run Android apps too. And given how far ahead of the field Android is on app numbers then any challenger platform needs a line-in to the dominant ecosystem to stand any chance of gaining traction in the shadow of the Google-powered competition.

Samsung has of course been trying to drum up developer interest in Tizen for several years now — and plans to host local Tizen app challenges in Russia and CIS countries when it launches the Z. There’s also a Tizen Developer Conference kicking off in San Francisco tomorrow.

But all these developer efforts are inevitably going against the grain in a smartphone market dominated by the duopoly of Android and iOS. Developers develop for the largest, most lucrative markets, as you’d expect, which is why Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform has struggled to eke out any marketshare.

Today’s outing of the Samsung Z follows an update Samsung put out last week to its original Galaxy Gear smartwatch, to switch it from Android to Tizen. That brought the wearable in line with the Galaxy Gear 2 — which was Tizen from the get-go, rather than Android.

The world’s number one smartphone maker, which built its handset empire atop Google’s Android, has seen growth slowing in recent years as competition within the Android ecosystem continues to intensify. Ergo, there is a strategic imperative for Samsung to diversify its reliance on Android, and to try to build traction behind an open alternative that’s not led by Google.

It is of course fantastically unlikely that Tizen is going to grow to the point where it entirely replaces Android in Samsung’s portfolio. But the platform gives Samsung another string to its bow, and one that looks like it’s being deliberated tuned to stand out on power efficiency and consumption grounds, as a lightweight alternative to Android.

So while the Samsung Z may not look especially stand-out on paper, it will be interesting to see how well features such as an ‘ultra power saving mode’ go down with users — and indeed whether consumers can be convinced to eschew Android for the promise of a more efficient alternative. The pricing of the handset — which has not yet been announced — will also undoubtedly be key.

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Twitter’s Crashlytics Launches Cross-Platform App Beta Testing Service

Back in February, Crashlytics announced its first product since being acquired by Twitter. That product was an app beta testing platform that would allow developers to distribute test apps to users to get feedback and suss out bugs.

The platform is now live, and anyone can sign up to use it. It’s essentially a competitor to TestFlight and HockeyApp, two of the most popular beta testing platforms out there for apps. TestFlight, of course, was acquired by Apple along with its parent company Burstly back in February.

The below gif, included in the post, actually says volumes. The UI and ease of inviting users activity and provisioning goes way beyond what Apple or Google offer:

The offering is cross-platform as well, which means developers can test across various platforms. I’m not a developer, but the offering looks pleasantly designed enough, and Crashlytics has testimonials from companies like DocuSign, Path and Hangtime that (unsurprisingly) sing its praises.

The current beta testing situation when it comes to Apple’s developer portal is dismal. It’s frustrating, slow and kludgy, and it’s one of the biggest complaints that developers have when it comes to Apple’s toolset. That’s why Apple likely purchased TestFlight and why third-party beta platforms have become popular at all.

“With Beta by Crashlytics, you can easily invite new testers through a seamless sign-up workflow, manage testers on the web or right within your IDE, and analyze key metrics to determine when your app is ready for prime time,” reads the announcement blog post. “Combined with our crash reporting solution, there is now a one-stop-shop for debugging and distributing apps. Oh, and it’s free.”

Among the developers I speak to, Crashlytics’ crash reporting product is well-regarded. Seems like the beta tool is something developers frustrated with current options should check out.

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A Danger Programmer Pours One Out For The Hiptop

With all this talk of laplets, tablets, iPhones, and GalTabs, we often forget one of the finest mobile platforms ever created, the Hiptop. But Chris DeSalvo didn’t forget. One of the original programmers for Danger’s groundbreaking hardware and software platform wrote a beautiful meditation last January on his work and the way it changed mobile. The piece didn’t get much traction then but it just resurfaced on Hacker News and deserves a mention.

The platform was groundbreaking at the time and the Sidekicks, from the early black and white models to the full-color roller-ball models that appeared just before the launch of the Android-powered HTC G1 that essentially spelled the end of the feature phone.

That is not to say the Sidekick was a feature phone. As DeSalvo notes, this phone had a real TCP/IP stack, web browser, powerful text handling systems, a microblogging setup, and an app store and OTA updates before Samsung was aware that the mobile Internet existed. One of the most important features, however, was IM. DeSalvo writes:

Multi-Protocol Instant Messaging—we included an IM client(AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger). We had Jabber support early on (the technology that Google Talk is based on) but we never shipped that. I don’t recall why. You could have up to 10 chats going at once and use the shoulder buttons to rotate between them, or chord the menu button and the number row on the keyboard to jump directly to a specific chat. It supported graphical emoticons and everything. We couldn’t use the full set of Emoji images back then because they were still under copyright from SoftBank in Japan, but we had pretty good coverage of the smileys that most people used.

The Sidekick died in July 2010 and its services were terminated a year later. A massive outage in 2009 reduced consumer trust in the service as millions of photos and other data disappeared completely. It was a mess. But the Sidekick could have been a contender. DeSalvo writes that they even approached Nintendo about offering a mobile-enabled Game Boy using the Hiptop platform. The plan was to allow OTA downloads of Nintendo games which, surprisingly, Nintendo’s licensing terms did not allow. This chimera could do some amazing stuff.

This led us do the following demo: start a Gameboy game and be watching regular Gameboy video. Then you’d receive a phone call and the Gameboy game would magically pause, and a hiptop alert window would display over top of the Gameboy video asking if you wanted to answer the call. As soon as the call was over the game would resume.

Nintendo passed on the technology.

The last Sidekick appeared in 2011 but it ran Android and was a Sidekick in name only. By that time all of Danger’s hard work had spiraled out into the rest of the ecosystem, leaving a legacy of solid mobile interfaces and some amazing memories. DeSalvo’s piece is a great walk down memory lane and definitely worth a read.

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Amazon’s Mayday Service On Fire Phone Means It Might Be Able To Sell Its Unique New Features

Amazon has brought Mayday to the Fire Phone, it announced today. The Mayday service offers one-tap access to customer service agents who can talk to phone users via video chat, and take over the screen on their devices to show them exactly how to do something, complete with annotations. The service is available 24 hours, and service representatives will respond to requests within 15 seconds, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said on stage.

It’s accessible from any screen on the Fire Phone via a simple pull-down of the menu from the top of the screen, in the same way you’d access notifications on an iPhone or Android device. Mayday is a big deal for Amazon, which recently shared stats about use of the service on its Kindle Fire HDX tablets. The company said that customer service agents generally respond in fewer than 10 seconds, which sounds like magic when you consider how long people generally have to wait on hold — often without even talking to a human — in most customer service scenarios.

Mayday is available free to all owners of the device, but its cost may be built into the cost of ownership; AT&T is going to charge $199 for the entry-level 32GB version, which is right up there with flagship devices from top-tier Android makers and the price of Apple’s iPhone at launch, despite the fact that on paper at least, its internal specs have more in common with last year’s Android flagships than today’s Galaxy S5, HTC One and others.

Fire Phone might need Mayday, too. It has a unique perspective-shifting 3D feature that makes it quite different from ordinary phones, as well as a dedicated Firefly button to let it identify products on the fly. These are not features that smartphone owners will be familiar with, and they could well require some explaining in order for new users to get comfortable operating them.

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Android Wear Developer Team Talks Building Apps For Moto 360 And LG G Watch

Android Wear is going to be a big part of Google I/O 2014 this year, and Google helps developers acclimate to the idea of wrist-borne apps. Already, internal developers working on the project are working on software to help them demonstrate and validate concepts for apps for the platform, and they’re using the upcoming LG G Watch and Moto 360 to help them prototype.

In a blog post detailing their efforts, Android Wear team members Roman Nurik and Timothy Jordan discuss how they built a walking tour app for Android Wear, using rough mock ups for a Google Glass app that never got built as a starting point. Doing so required thinking about battery conservation, differing notification prioritization, and also working with the constraints of a screen size that maxes out at 140 x 140 (or 160 x 160 on the round Moto 360) resolution.

The app is simple, basically popping up a notification on your wrist when you’re near a walking tour in the software’s database, and then providing you with simple directions if you choose to undertake a trip. It offers you a number of stops, and a very brief description of the place when you arrive spread across multiple pages.

It’s a clever little bit of software, and one that emphasizes Google’s view of how designing for it will be much different from creating experiences either for mobile or desktop. It’s also a clear and present sign that wearable design and development will be a big part of Google’s I/O show this year. Will that be enough for us to finally see wearables take off in a big way? I’m not making any bets just yet.

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OnLive Is Now Streaming Top-Tier Games To The Wikipad Gaming Tablet

Remember OnLive? Despite a messy sale to escape a dark and stormy financial picture, the company lives on, and in March it launched its new CloudLift subscription gaming service. Today, it’s partnering with Wikipad, maker of the dedicated Android gaming tablet, to deliver full AAA PC gaming to the tablet. OnLive already offers this to any Android device with access to Google Play via its app, but the version for Wikipad is optimized, with special support for its dedicated built-in gaming controller.

The Wikipad 7 will be the first to get the OnLive treatment, but support will also be extended to Wikipad’s forthcoming Gamevice hardware, which adds a detachable gamepad to any tablet that wants one. The game streaming from OnLive can be paired with the CloudLift subscription service which makes it possible for players to pick up right where they left off on their home gaming rigs thanks to cloud-based save states and metadata.

It’s a move that should add value to both Wikipad’s business and OnLive’s user base, but in the end it’s unlikely to prove truly game-changing to either. Especially as players like Nvidia are moving to create their own streaming game services like GRID, the system that works in the same way as OnLive but with the backing of one of the biggest mobile chip and graphics card makers in the world.

It has yet to prove itself a sizeable business for anyone involved, however, which could just be a case of the tech (especially on the user end) needing to play catch-up with the service.

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