It was a recent day on a cool brisk evening. I was out with our ten year old walking the dog after dark and, as he sometimes does, he started asking me about the stars because they were out brightly that night. So I whip out the phone and downloaded Sky Map hoping to show the relative position of the far off planets in our constellation, but it was a flop. Apparently I didn’t have a built in compass.
Then I was at a runners event with nothing but my cell phone after a run and there were stands with merchandise I wanted to buy. No plastic, no cash, no purchase. I realized I didn’t have a built in NFC chip on my phone.
And the light bulb went off, I have a phone with those features sitting in a box at home.
My first post on the OnePlus One was from early 2016 here. I’ve owned it since 2015. I did shelve it in Spring of 2017. Why? Because the CyanogenMod ROM’s were burying the battery in less than a day and in order to try improving it, I needed to find a suitable ROM that might improve the battery life. I didn’t have any luck at that time, in spite of the fact the hardware should have easily been able to support a current ROM. So I bought a Motorola G4 Plus with 64GB as a daily driver and put my OPO away.
Back to the present day. I settled into doing some homework. I discovered SlimRoms which sounded bare bones enough to provide some battery improvement.
So I followed these instructions. Kudos to Habib.Khan316 for doing such a great job of making it simple. Along with thanks to the OPO community for being as collaborative as they are. I deviated when it came to loading the specific OS as SlimRom rather than LineageOS, but the principles are the same. In fact the principles are nearly the same for any Android device.
After loading SlimRom, I got to work loading all my familiar apps. But I’m also taking my time because there are probably a few apps I could do without.
Now I have the functionality I was missing and since I’m not using Google Launcher it removes Google Feed but that’s another post.
The battery life is definitely improved back to an approximate 36 hour interval based on the native battery app. Far better than the 12 hour life it had once had. The OPO is running Android 7.1 without a hitch, so it’s current.
So, what’s the prognosis? I’m going to keep using it for a while and see how it goes. I’m experimenting with several things on it, so it’s fun for now. Sometimes the change is worth just learning, regardless of the final end result.
21 Buzzards 