The Ultimate Pixel 3 KILLER - Poco F1 with Mods!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,499 words · ~7 min read
0:00
the pocophone f1 is a truly remarkable
0:03
device it's got a flagship tier snapdragon 845 soc a 6.18 inch ips
0:09
display six gigs of RAM 128 gigs of storage and a 4 000 milliamp
0:15
hour battery and it costs just 300 us
0:19
dollars off contract so then why weren't
0:22
we all excited about the pocophone f1 when everyone else was a month ago the
0:27
specs of this thing are amazing
0:31
well it's because the included miui operating
0:34
system is imo tarabad
0:38
so we're going to walk you guys through how you can turn this 300 flagship
0:42
killer into almost a pixel 3xl
0:47
equivalent for free
0:56
now even if you do like miui there's a
0:59
fair bit of evidence that xiaomi is intentionally nerfing the camera on the
1:04
f1 through software to keep their budget
1:07
poco phone brand from competing with their higher end devices
1:11
so Android software flashing then honestly
1:14
i haven't given much thought to custom roms since samsung ditched touchwiz and
1:19
cyanogenmod died a couple of years ago but lineage os which was founded shortly
1:24
after cyanogenic's demise by a few of its core developers has been going
1:28
strong ever since lineage os shares many of cyanogenmod's strengths like its lack
1:33
of bloatware solid customization and regular security updates but oddly
1:38
enough one difference is that it doesn't have the stock google apps by default
1:43
thanks to some legal encouragement from google so that stuff will need to be
1:47
flashed on afterward more on that later the point is once you put it all
1:51
together you end up with what is effectively the stock Android experience
1:56
like you would get on a pixel device and with a little bit of tinkering we
2:00
can even make it look like the new pixel 3s so that's what we're gonna do now
2:05
it's almost time to begin but before i do i want to put a big disclaimer this
2:11
process is going to involve wiping it you will lose your data
2:16
all right so with that out of the way let's get started you'll need a computer
2:20
and a usb cable as well as a full charge on your phone's battery to ensure that
2:24
it doesn't die during the following procedure starting in the settings app we're going
2:29
to navigate to about phone then click the miui version or build number until
2:34
it says you are now a developer totally for that easy what this actually
2:38
does is unlock the developer options that we're going to need for this
2:42
process including usb debugging and oem unlocking
2:46
on xiaomi phones like the pocophone unlocking the bootloader requires you to
2:50
register your device to a xiaomi account with a linked phone number after which
2:55
there is a 72-hour waiting period before you can unlock the bootloader once your
3:00
device is registered to your me account with the phone number download the me
3:04
unlock app to your pc from the description we'll have that down below
3:08
and run through the steps in the app your phone should now have an unlocked
3:12
bootloader which allows you to flash a custom recovery firmware
3:16
next up we'll be installing our custom recovery firmware this will allow us to
3:20
flash our third-party os onto the device
3:23
so we will need platform tools linked in the description so download and extract
3:28
that then move the entire contents to a folder named adb in the root of your
3:32
computer's c drive with those files in place plug the
3:36
device into your pc and then hold the volume down and power buttons until you
3:40
are in fastboot mode at this point it's probably a good idea to start
3:45
downloading the larger files that you'll need including the 9.0 firmware and
3:49
vendor files the latest lineage os build and twrp
3:53
all of these are also linked in the video description
3:57
back on the pc open cmd and now we can
4:00
get to flashing our custom recovery firmware first up we're going to check if
4:04
fastboot can detect our connected device once that's good to go we can move our
4:08
twrp recovery file into the adb directory flash it and then boot to it
4:14
back on the phone you should be booted into twrp mode so there should be a
4:19
prompt for a password here but just click cancel and then wipe just the data
4:24
partition go ahead and reboot to recovery and then
4:27
we can copy over both the disable force encryption and magisk files we're going
4:32
to install the encryption disabler first followed by magisk with a reboot in
4:36
between now our poco f1 is rooted and
4:40
ready for a custom rom at this point you can choose between
4:44
lineage os pixel experience or whatever
4:48
else you're into but we ran into some weird bugs with pixel experience so
4:52
we're not ready to recommend it at this time since lineage os doesn't come with
4:56
google apps you'll need a couple of extra steps here so we're going to need
4:59
to download them separately at the link in the video description
5:02
please note that you must use the ARM 64
5:06
Android 9.0 nano variant this has a very
5:09
small number of apps but the larger packages can cause issues so just grab
5:14
anything else that you're missing from the play store later stick with nano
5:18
please so copy over the rom files including the
5:22
vendor firmware the lineage os build and the google apps that we downloaded just
5:26
then and start by installing the vendor firmware followed by the lineage os file
5:30
and the google apps lastly clear the cache and then reboot
5:34
the phone back to Android and congratulations you now have a fully
5:39
functional lineage os equipped flagship killer
5:43
but you'll probably need to reinstall the magisk root app via twrp like we did
5:47
before and then after doing that
5:50
honestly i was pretty impressed the experience is damn close to a pixel
5:56
phone but we can still go further
6:01
the ruthless pixel launcher from the xda Labs app store is almost a perfect copy
6:07
of the pixel 3 launcher and with a little tweaking can be made basically
6:12
indistinguishable from the real thing as for the fancy pixel 3 live wallpapers
6:17
well those can be had simply by downloading google wallpapers from the
6:21
play store as well as a third-party wallpaper pack app that we have linked
6:25
in the video description and bam
6:29
from the front this thing might as well be the same damn
6:34
phone save for the difference between the ips screen of the pocophone and the
6:38
OLED on the pixel as for from the back well the
6:43
pocophone's kevlar finish actually feels pretty good and non-slippery in the hand
6:48
but it doesn't look amazing to my eye but then the pixel 3 doesn't look great from this
6:53
side anyway so it's not like you're really missing much we both got the
6:56
fingerprint scanner back there as for the camera by default the poco f1 has a
7:01
pretty crap camera to be frank but
7:04
with the ported google camera app from the pixel phone which you can install
7:08
via the link in the video description it's it's really simple
7:11
it can actually hang with the big guns colors tend to be a little over
7:15
saturated with slightly lower sharpness compared to the pixel 3 xl but
7:19
surprisingly in portrait mode it actually has better edge detection
7:24
likely thanks to the second rear camera
7:27
so in a nutshell there are some caveats here uh there's
7:31
the time investment into flashing your device the ir face unlock camera doesn't
7:36
yet work on lineage os and there's the possibility of voiding your warranty
7:40
but this thing is really great for 300
7:44
like really great to put that price in perspective everyone was losing their
7:49
when oneplus launched the oneplus one for 300
7:53
and that was four years ago since then inflation has gone up and
7:59
phone prices in general have absolutely skyrocketed so in today's terms
8:04
you could literally buy a pack of these for your whole family for the price of a
8:10
single iphone 10s pixel 3 xl or note 9.
8:14
think about that so thanks for watching guys this video
8:18
was a little unusual for us so if you liked it hit the like button get
8:22
subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
8:26
we're gonna have a lot of links in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like
8:30
this one and our community forum which you should totally join
8:35
look at that it's all like pixely and stuff you know
8:38
look at that