Gadgetory

the poco phone f1 is a truly remarkable device it's got a flagship tier Snapdragon 845 SOC a six point one eight inch IPS display six gigs of ram a hundred and twenty eight gigs of storage and a four thousand milliamp hour battery and it costs just three hundred US dollars off contract so then why weren't we all excited about the poco phone f1 when everyone else was a month ago the specs of this thing are amazing well it's because the included me UI operating system is IMO terribad so we're gonna walk you guys through how you can turn this $300 flagship killer into almost a pixel three XL equivalent for free burne will take say 500 has a modern Middle East design with its brushed aluminum panels and dual hinged swing tempered glass panels check it out today at the link below now even if you do like me UI there's a fair bit of evidence that Xiaomi is intentionally nerfing the camera on the f1 through software to keep their budget poco phone brand from competing with their higher-end devices so Android software flashing then honestly I haven't given much thought to custom roms since Samsung ditched TouchWiz and CyanogenMod died a couple of years ago but lineage OS which was founded shortly after signings demise by a few of its core developers has been going strong ever since lineage OS shares many of CyanogenMod strengths like its lack of bloatware solid customization and regular security updates but oddly enough one difference is that it doesn't have the stock google apps by default thanks to some legal encouragement from google so that stuff will need to be flashed on afterwards more on that later the point is once you put it all together you end up with what is effectively the stock Android experience like you would get on a pixel device and with a little bit of tinkering we can even make it look like the new pixel threes so that's what we're gonna do now it's almost time to begin but before I do I want to put a big disclaimer this process is going to involve wiping it you will lose your data all right so it's not another way let's get started you'll need a computer and a USB cable as well as a full charge on your phone's battery to ensure that it doesn't die during the following procedure starting in the Settings app we're gonna navigate to about phone then click the me UI version or build number until it says you are now a developer open it were that easy what this actually does is unlock the developer options that we're gonna need for this process including USB debugging and OEM and locking on Shelby phones like the poco phone unlocking the bootloader requires you to register your device to a Xiaomi account with a linked phone number after which there's a 72 hour waiting period before you can unlock the bootloader once your device has read - you're me account with the phone number download the me unlock app to your PC from the description we'll have that down below and run through the steps in the app your phone should now have an unlocked bootloader which allows you to flash a custom recovery firmware next up we'll be installing our custom recovery firmware this will allow us to flash our third-party OS on to the device so we will need platform tools linked in the description so download and extract that then move the entire contents to a folder named ADB in the root of your computer's C Drive with those files in place plug the device into your PC and then hold the volume down and power buttons until you are in fastboot mode at this point it's probably a good idea to start downloading the larger files that you'll need including the 9.0 firmware and vendor files the latest lineage OS build and T WRP all of these are also linked in the video description back on the PC open CMD and now we can get to flashing our custom recovery firmware first up we're gonna check if fastboot can detect our connected device once that's good to go we can move our T WRP recovery file into the adb directory flash it and then boot to it back on the phone you should be booted into T WRP mode so there should be a prompt for a password here but just click cancel and then wipe just the data partition go ahead and reboot to recovery and then we can copy over both the disable force encryption and magic files we're going to install the encryption disabler first followed by magic with a reboot in between now our poco f1 is rooted and ready for a custom ROM at this point you can choose between lineage OS pixel experience or whatever else you're into but we ran into some weird bugs with pixel experience so we're not ready to recommend it at this time since lineage OS doesn't come with Google Apps you'll need a couple of extra steps here so we're gonna need to download them separately at the link in the video description please note that you must use the arm 64 Android 9.0 nano very this has a very small number of apps but the larger packages can cause issues so just grab anything else that you're missing from the Play Store later stick with nano please so copy over the rom files including the vendor firmware the lineage OS build and the google apps that we downloaded just then and start by installing the vendor firmware followed by the lineage OS file and the Google Apps lastly clear the cache and then reboot the phone back to Android and congratulations you now have a fully functional lineage os equipped flagship killer but you'll probably need to reinstall the Magister dot via T WRP like we did before and then after doing that honestly I was pretty impressed the experience is damn close to a pixel phone but we can still go further the ruthless pixel launcher from the XDA labs app store is almost a perfect copy of the pixel free launcher and with a little tweaking can be made basically indistinguishable from the real thing as for the fancy pixel 3 live wallpapers well those can be had simply by downloading Google wallpapers from the Play Store as well as a third-party wallpaper pack app that we have linked in the video description and bam from the front this thing might as well be the same damn phone saved for the difference between the IPS screen of the polka phone and the OLED on the pixel as for from the back well the polka phones Kevlar finish actually feels pretty good and non slippery in the hand but it doesn't look amazing to my eye but then the pixel 3 doesn't look great from this side anyway so it's not like you're really missing much we both got the fingerprint scanner back there as for the camera by default the poco f1 has a pretty crap camera to be frank but with the ported Google camera app from the pixel phone which you can install via the link in the video description it's it's really simple it can actually hang with the big guns colors tend to be a little oversaturated with slightly lower sharpness compared to the pixel 3xl but surprisingly in portrait it actually has better edge detection likely thanks to the second rear camera so in a nutshell there are some caveats here there's the time investment into flashing your device the IR face unlock camera doesn't yet work on lineage OS and there's the possibility of voiding your warranty but this thing is really great for $300 like really great to put that price in perspective everyone was losing their shape when oneplus launched the oneplus one for $300 and that was four years ago since then inflation has gone up and phone prices in general have absolutely skyrocketed so in today's terms you could literally buy a pack of these for your whole family for the price of a single iPhone 10's pixel 3xl or note 9 think about that the master off XA k g:k 7 X X red edition open-back headphones are on sale for 20% off for cyber monday they feature the same legendary sound and build quality as their predecessor and that was a huge hit with the audiophile community with highs that were boosted by an innovative flatware voice coil mids that were brought up to better balance the range and lows that were raised by three decibels for an immersive sound these are a collaborative design with mass drop and AKG and they include the custom ruby red color way to help the aesthetic really pop from the competition they're now 159 down from $1.99 so join the drop today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys this video was a little unusual for us so if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description we're gonna have a lot of links in the video description also down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join that's all like pixely and stuff