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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
And the most important thing about this phone was that it was priced at about half the cost of comparable phones at the time it came out. Which makes this phone the only smartphone that I have ever bought new, after careful analysis and thought about whether to spend that much money on a phone. But it was holiday money that I had, so it wasn't coming out of some other budget, so I registered on the website and applied for an invitation to get the phone. Which came after a few months, and then I had it in my hot little hands and I was ready to go on this machine.
The first offering from OnePlus, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oppo, was marketed as a "Flagship Killer," meant to provide high-end specifications at much more affordable prices, and boy, did it deliver on that promise! With a powerful quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM (slightly less than the flagships) and 64 GB of storage (twice what the flagships we're offering) and half the cost, the One was the kind of phone for people who wanted all the power they could get and didn't want to pay inflated prices for it. It was awesome, and I have yet to see a phone of that kind of comparable specifications and price ever since. Which makes me supremely salty that nobody else decided that they could do what OnePlus was doing, but better, after OnePlus was eaten by Oppo. OnePlus now churns out phones at flagship prices that are comparable to flagships, rather than surpassing those flagships by clear margins and offering the same price as them. The market space left by OnePlus is being for someone to come in and take it, even if what they can offer is only near-flagships for significantly cheaper. If bet there are a lot more people than me who are exactly in the market for that kind of phone.
Another major positive for getting this phone was that it already ran software based on the popular CyanogenMod. Instead of having to find an exploit to get the thing I wanted installed, it was already there for me. And it was easy to unlock the bootloader so that another of the numerous Android aftermarket operating systems could be installed on it, making all the Android Open Kang Project, DirtyUnicorns, SlimROM, and other users happy that they could put their preferred Android experience on this powerful phone, once the project had an installable package ready for it. Because of the decisions made by OnePlus about this phone, I was confident that I would be able to buy it and hold on to it for however long it took until the phone physically would stop working. As you can see from the OS list above, even though the OnePlus officially went three versions of Android before there were no more official updates for it, the community behind the phone made it possible for the phone to go through four more versions of Android afterward. And frankly, if the charging port itself hadn't basically become detached from the rest of the phone, I might still be using it and cackling about how I'd managed to keep that phone going through 9 versions of Android so far, as there is a version of LineageOS for this phone that's based on Android 11. Which is one more version available than there has been for the phone I switched to just before the charging port finally gave out for good. Because people still love this phone and want to keep developing for it, proving their interest in the mantra of OnePlus ("Never Settle") far more than the company itself seems to have.
This was the first smartphone I owned that didn't have a physical keyboard as part of it. For the first few iterations of smartphones, many of them had models where a physical keyboard could be slid or hinged out for typing, but at a certain point, I guess the cost and complexity became an issue, or they all decided to leave physical keyboards to Research In Motion and went with a design where a keyboard would appear on the touch screen when it became necessary to enter text. Some keyboards are strictly touch type, with one touch corresponding to one keypress, with a menu of possible keystrokes appearing if the touch is held down for a certain interval. The iPhone and iPad keyboards are still this way, and if you have good awareness of where your thumbs are, it's possible to achieve some excellent trying speeds. Other types of keyboard allow the user to glide from one key to the next without lifting their finger or pen until they've completed the word they're trying to type. The keyboard software interprets the gesture and then types the word it believes was intended. This interpretative step is the source of many autocarrot errors, as the strokes for words with different meanings can look mostly similar, if their spellings are close enough to each other that someone trying to go quickly might produce a different gesture than what they intended. Just because I touched all the characters in style doesn't mean the software won't decide I really meant stole or stile. Or any number of other very irritating situations where i was sure i entered the right letters, only when rereading to find out that the software had found a new way to misinterpret me. The most popular of those gesturing keyboards was Swype, and so they became known in the popular parlance as Swype keyboards. I find I do better with swiping keyboards than solely touch-typing ones when I don't have a choice for a physical keyboard, which is what I really want to come back into fashion. Alas.
The amount of storage space available was also very freeing, as most of my previous phones to this point had required having a microSD card attached to the phone for saving just about anything. The general lack of storage space in phones also meant having to make decisions about what apps would be allowed to stay on the phone and which ones would have to go any time a new app was being introduced and put to use. Or to use some off-label methods with regard to file systems and their arrangements such that the removable storage is seen as an extension of the system partition, or there's some (I think) very fancy compression and decompression tricks combined with swapping bits in and out so that all the apps believe they're in the right space when they're asked to open and run. Which only worked on some apps in the first place, so there still had to be some decisions made about which apps were allowed to exist and which ones weren't, and to know which of those could be transferred to the SD card and would run just fine. (This is another of those things that seems weird to people of the current time, because most phones and tablets have enough storage space internally now to handle most apps and downloads and everything else, or at least it's easier to free up space by moving pictures and other things off of the computer or deleting them locally and letting things live in the cloud.)
Being an early adopter did come with one drawback, though. Most of the time, when you were using a custom operating system, to achieve all of the necessary functions, superuser access had to be provided. And there were several applications available that needed superuser permissions, usually the kind that would allow you to take snapshots of your system so you could restore all the apps and their settings if you decided to try out another operating system, or if the one that you were following decided to stop updating. Normally, the superuser binary would be installed into the system space, so it could be accessed appropriately. Unfortunately for people who wanted to have custom operating systems, an underlying component of Google's systems, SafetyNet, began to start looking to see if there was a superuser binary installed, because the presence of a superuser binary (or an unlocked bootloader) means that a device, in their opinion, is not secure enough to perform only permitted operations. A device that fails a SafetyNet check causes some applications to stop working. For the most part, those problems were related to apps that dealt in financial transactions, where having a system potentially compromised to the point of other apps being able to execute superuser-privileged actions is a liability risk. It makes sense that an app handling money wants to be extra-sure that the transactions conducted on it are legit and secure.
It makes a lot less sense that a program like Netflix would refuse to show up or install from the store at all if SafetyNet isn't satisfied. (They'd probably say they're concerned about piracy of their content if the ystem isn't properly secured.) Where the bane struck, however, was with Pokemon Go. After having played for a little while, perfectly okay, suddenly it was impossible to log into the game, with a message declaring that the phone I had been just using for it was no longer eligible to play, because, it turned out, it had failed SafetyNet. This was back in the days before the revamp that made PokeCoins much more easily available to collect, so I guess Niantic was also concerned about botting and cheating and people not having a good experience and being completely unable to collect any coins at all for free, which is what the gym system was supposed to be able to do. But this also sparked off a quest for finding ways of removing or changing the way that superuser access was handled, as removing the superuser binary with the official uninstallation method still apparently left enough traces of its previous existence that SafetyNet still believed that the phone was unable to play. (Extra annoyingly, at this time, most of the things that had needed superuser access before had either integrated into Android proper or no longer needed that access, so it was no longer a requirement that superuser binaries be installed all along with the custom operating systems.) Eventually, we did find a working solution on how to suppress the check so that, for the most part, the game would run and I could get back to the business of catching digital monsters around me. It wasn't perfect, so every now and then there was a hiccup and the game would refuse to play for me until I uninstalled and reinstalled it (once the protection had tripped, the game refused to believe that it had been shown an error unless it was uninstalled and reinstalled, and then it would work for a few weeks before the protection would be wrongly tripped again and we would do this thing all over. It was inconvenient, but at least it worked.
As it turns out, I did manage to keep the promise of buying and holding on to the phone until it couldn't physically work any more. Many years of rough handling made the charging port loose, and eventually it would only charge if the cable were connected in a specific way and pressure. It held out on me until we bought a used replacement phone on a bargain bin sale and were able to get enough of the data off to the new phone. I really liked that phone, and I have yet to find one that I've liked more.
- CPU: Quad-core Krait 400 @ 2.5 GHz, part of the Qualcomm MSM8974AC Snapdragon 801 System on a Chip
- Memory: 3 GB RAM
- Graphics: Adreno 330 @ 578 MHz, max resolution 1920x1080
- Sound: Onboard sound with monaural speaker capabilities, connected to headphones through 3.5" jack
- Inputs/Peripherals: Capacitive touch screen and three physical buttons for Home, Menu, and Back, microUSB 2.0 port for charging and data transfer, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Display, Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.1, integrated 13MP photography and video camera (back), 5MP selfie camera (front), Global Positioning Satellite system, Near Field Communucation system,
- Storage: 64GB internal storage
- OS: Cyanogen OS 11 (Android 4.3 "Jelly Bean" and Android 4.4(.x) "KitKat") → Cyanogen OS 12 (Android 5.0(.x) "Lollipop"), → Cyanogen OS 13 (Android 6.0(.x) "Marshmallow"), → Lineage OS 14.1 (Android 7.1 "Nougat") → Lineage OS 15.1 (Android 8.1 "Oreo") → Lineage OS 16.0 (Android 9 "Pie") → Lineage OS 17.1 (Android 10 - likely would have been "Quiche" if the naming convention had continued)
And the most important thing about this phone was that it was priced at about half the cost of comparable phones at the time it came out. Which makes this phone the only smartphone that I have ever bought new, after careful analysis and thought about whether to spend that much money on a phone. But it was holiday money that I had, so it wasn't coming out of some other budget, so I registered on the website and applied for an invitation to get the phone. Which came after a few months, and then I had it in my hot little hands and I was ready to go on this machine.
The first offering from OnePlus, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oppo, was marketed as a "Flagship Killer," meant to provide high-end specifications at much more affordable prices, and boy, did it deliver on that promise! With a powerful quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM (slightly less than the flagships) and 64 GB of storage (twice what the flagships we're offering) and half the cost, the One was the kind of phone for people who wanted all the power they could get and didn't want to pay inflated prices for it. It was awesome, and I have yet to see a phone of that kind of comparable specifications and price ever since. Which makes me supremely salty that nobody else decided that they could do what OnePlus was doing, but better, after OnePlus was eaten by Oppo. OnePlus now churns out phones at flagship prices that are comparable to flagships, rather than surpassing those flagships by clear margins and offering the same price as them. The market space left by OnePlus is being for someone to come in and take it, even if what they can offer is only near-flagships for significantly cheaper. If bet there are a lot more people than me who are exactly in the market for that kind of phone.
Another major positive for getting this phone was that it already ran software based on the popular CyanogenMod. Instead of having to find an exploit to get the thing I wanted installed, it was already there for me. And it was easy to unlock the bootloader so that another of the numerous Android aftermarket operating systems could be installed on it, making all the Android Open Kang Project, DirtyUnicorns, SlimROM, and other users happy that they could put their preferred Android experience on this powerful phone, once the project had an installable package ready for it. Because of the decisions made by OnePlus about this phone, I was confident that I would be able to buy it and hold on to it for however long it took until the phone physically would stop working. As you can see from the OS list above, even though the OnePlus officially went three versions of Android before there were no more official updates for it, the community behind the phone made it possible for the phone to go through four more versions of Android afterward. And frankly, if the charging port itself hadn't basically become detached from the rest of the phone, I might still be using it and cackling about how I'd managed to keep that phone going through 9 versions of Android so far, as there is a version of LineageOS for this phone that's based on Android 11. Which is one more version available than there has been for the phone I switched to just before the charging port finally gave out for good. Because people still love this phone and want to keep developing for it, proving their interest in the mantra of OnePlus ("Never Settle") far more than the company itself seems to have.
This was the first smartphone I owned that didn't have a physical keyboard as part of it. For the first few iterations of smartphones, many of them had models where a physical keyboard could be slid or hinged out for typing, but at a certain point, I guess the cost and complexity became an issue, or they all decided to leave physical keyboards to Research In Motion and went with a design where a keyboard would appear on the touch screen when it became necessary to enter text. Some keyboards are strictly touch type, with one touch corresponding to one keypress, with a menu of possible keystrokes appearing if the touch is held down for a certain interval. The iPhone and iPad keyboards are still this way, and if you have good awareness of where your thumbs are, it's possible to achieve some excellent trying speeds. Other types of keyboard allow the user to glide from one key to the next without lifting their finger or pen until they've completed the word they're trying to type. The keyboard software interprets the gesture and then types the word it believes was intended. This interpretative step is the source of many autocarrot errors, as the strokes for words with different meanings can look mostly similar, if their spellings are close enough to each other that someone trying to go quickly might produce a different gesture than what they intended. Just because I touched all the characters in style doesn't mean the software won't decide I really meant stole or stile. Or any number of other very irritating situations where i was sure i entered the right letters, only when rereading to find out that the software had found a new way to misinterpret me. The most popular of those gesturing keyboards was Swype, and so they became known in the popular parlance as Swype keyboards. I find I do better with swiping keyboards than solely touch-typing ones when I don't have a choice for a physical keyboard, which is what I really want to come back into fashion. Alas.
The amount of storage space available was also very freeing, as most of my previous phones to this point had required having a microSD card attached to the phone for saving just about anything. The general lack of storage space in phones also meant having to make decisions about what apps would be allowed to stay on the phone and which ones would have to go any time a new app was being introduced and put to use. Or to use some off-label methods with regard to file systems and their arrangements such that the removable storage is seen as an extension of the system partition, or there's some (I think) very fancy compression and decompression tricks combined with swapping bits in and out so that all the apps believe they're in the right space when they're asked to open and run. Which only worked on some apps in the first place, so there still had to be some decisions made about which apps were allowed to exist and which ones weren't, and to know which of those could be transferred to the SD card and would run just fine. (This is another of those things that seems weird to people of the current time, because most phones and tablets have enough storage space internally now to handle most apps and downloads and everything else, or at least it's easier to free up space by moving pictures and other things off of the computer or deleting them locally and letting things live in the cloud.)
Being an early adopter did come with one drawback, though. Most of the time, when you were using a custom operating system, to achieve all of the necessary functions, superuser access had to be provided. And there were several applications available that needed superuser permissions, usually the kind that would allow you to take snapshots of your system so you could restore all the apps and their settings if you decided to try out another operating system, or if the one that you were following decided to stop updating. Normally, the superuser binary would be installed into the system space, so it could be accessed appropriately. Unfortunately for people who wanted to have custom operating systems, an underlying component of Google's systems, SafetyNet, began to start looking to see if there was a superuser binary installed, because the presence of a superuser binary (or an unlocked bootloader) means that a device, in their opinion, is not secure enough to perform only permitted operations. A device that fails a SafetyNet check causes some applications to stop working. For the most part, those problems were related to apps that dealt in financial transactions, where having a system potentially compromised to the point of other apps being able to execute superuser-privileged actions is a liability risk. It makes sense that an app handling money wants to be extra-sure that the transactions conducted on it are legit and secure.
It makes a lot less sense that a program like Netflix would refuse to show up or install from the store at all if SafetyNet isn't satisfied. (They'd probably say they're concerned about piracy of their content if the ystem isn't properly secured.) Where the bane struck, however, was with Pokemon Go. After having played for a little while, perfectly okay, suddenly it was impossible to log into the game, with a message declaring that the phone I had been just using for it was no longer eligible to play, because, it turned out, it had failed SafetyNet. This was back in the days before the revamp that made PokeCoins much more easily available to collect, so I guess Niantic was also concerned about botting and cheating and people not having a good experience and being completely unable to collect any coins at all for free, which is what the gym system was supposed to be able to do. But this also sparked off a quest for finding ways of removing or changing the way that superuser access was handled, as removing the superuser binary with the official uninstallation method still apparently left enough traces of its previous existence that SafetyNet still believed that the phone was unable to play. (Extra annoyingly, at this time, most of the things that had needed superuser access before had either integrated into Android proper or no longer needed that access, so it was no longer a requirement that superuser binaries be installed all along with the custom operating systems.) Eventually, we did find a working solution on how to suppress the check so that, for the most part, the game would run and I could get back to the business of catching digital monsters around me. It wasn't perfect, so every now and then there was a hiccup and the game would refuse to play for me until I uninstalled and reinstalled it (once the protection had tripped, the game refused to believe that it had been shown an error unless it was uninstalled and reinstalled, and then it would work for a few weeks before the protection would be wrongly tripped again and we would do this thing all over. It was inconvenient, but at least it worked.
As it turns out, I did manage to keep the promise of buying and holding on to the phone until it couldn't physically work any more. Many years of rough handling made the charging port loose, and eventually it would only charge if the cable were connected in a specific way and pressure. It held out on me until we bought a used replacement phone on a bargain bin sale and were able to get enough of the data off to the new phone. I really liked that phone, and I have yet to find one that I've liked more.
