SAN FRANCISCO—Today Chinese startup phone company OnePlus formally announced its flagship One phone, which, when it launches, will be running a version of Cyanogenmod 11, an open Android variant. Cyanogenmod has long catered to advanced users who want to customize their phones as much as possible, and it seems that with the OnePlus One, the community-driven custom ROM company will maintain that spirit.

“We've spent the last six months to a year working on a new look,” Cyanogenmod founder Steve Kondik told the small audience of press today. “As part of this we’re still sticking to the Cyanogenmod ethos which is that no two users are the same.”

The phone’s specs are well known at this point, and they include a 2.5Ghz Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, a 5.5-inch 1080p LCD, a 13MP Sony Exmor camera, a 3100 mAh battery, and 16 or 64 GB of storage. The phone will start unlocked and contract-free at an incredibly cheap $299. OnePlus’ CEO Pete Lau told Ars that the company is able to sell the phone so cheaply in part because it doesn't have any overhead in terms of retail stores and just sells the phone online. Neither does Google, really, whose Nexus 5 starts at $349, but Lau told Ars, “Our business plan isn’t fixed yet."

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

It should be noted that the One has no removable battery. It supports GSM bands 850/900/1800/1900MHz, WCDMA bands 1/2/4/5/8, and LTE bands 1/3/4/7/17/38/40. US customers will be able to use the phone on T-Mobile and AT&T's networks, but European customers will only have limited LTE support.

Another issue with the phone’s hardware itself is that OnePlus seems to have taken Cyanogenmod’s “customize everything” motto to heart, especially with the phone’s buttons, which can be enabled in either a capacitive or on-screen layout. A OnePlus representative explained that the design team was pretty divided on which type of button layout was better and decided to give users a choice. (On-screen buttons tend to be more popular in China, whereas capacitive buttons appeal to an American audience, but the OnePlus representative was adamant that the One is definitely geared toward an American audience and not trying to straddle the preferences of two cultures.)

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Still, that can cause the design to seem like an afterthought if you do decide to go with the capacitive buttons, because the bottom of the phone then contains what looks like an extraordinarily large bezel.

The phone felt light to us, with a bright screen and a smooth plastic backing. The screen is slightly raised above the metal bezel on the phone.

Cruising around on the phone was also speedy and easy. On the software front, Cyanogenmod announced a new Theme Store today to allow people to customize their phone's theme. The OnePlus will be "mix-and-match capable, to create true expression of self for the users,” a Cyanogenmod representative said.

“We feel like Android has grown up a lot, but what it’s missing is the concept of ownership," the representative continued. “Most of the apps on the Samsung experience aren’t even used, and we don’t want the bloat experience.”

Cyanogenmod representatives also announced a "new camera experience built around the concept of quick and simple use,” with live filter support for Instagram addicts. The One will ship with a new gallery application that will be able to auto-organize photos both locally and on whatever cloud storage service a user might subscribe to. (Flickr, DropBox, Google+, and Facebook are options at the moment, and more services will be added later.) With the gallery comes a “moments viewed” feature, which takes geolocation and time information to smartly auto-organize photos into “moments.”

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss



The big question: Updates

The other issue is update timing, and Cyanogenmod's last phone, the Oppo N1, has still not been upgraded to KitKat yet. (OnePlus is an offshoot of the company that put out the Oppo 5, but the two companies are not related at this point.)

Ars sat down with Steve Kondik at the unveiling today and asked him whether support for this phone will be different. He told us that Cyanogenmod has “worked with Google to improve our process.”

"We’re hoping to get on a two week release model,” Kondik added. Still, Cyanogenmod is considerably more complicated than a custom OEM skin, and Kondik admitted that pushing an update two weeks from Google doing the same is a “software architecture problem.” To overcome that, Cyanogenmod plans to move to rolling updates.

"Cyanogenmod has this reputation that on one hand we’re not doing stable releases… but we want to bring the rolling release thing to this device. So it’s constant updates,” Kondik told Ars. “We have people that are very passionate and want to get things out as quickly as they can."

This special, rolling-update support will be OnePlus One-specific, but Kondik says he thinks such updates will trickle down to the community quickly as well. Special support for the OnePlus One will last for two years.

For now, it seems that the hardware and software companies are both on the same page in spirit, although “more customization” may not bring the same value to users when applied to hardware as it does to software. While Ars couldn’t walk away with a phone today, we’ll do a more in-depth review when we get one shipped to us later in May.

Correction: The original version of this story stated that the One would be a GSM-only device, but the phone will actually support GSM bands 850/900/1800/1900MHz, WCDMA bands 1/2/4/5/8, and LTE bands 1/3/4/7/17/38/40.