Hasta La Gadget!

Cyanogen is looking to make a name for itself in the mainstream Android smartphone, after ruling the custom ROMs scene for years. The team makes some of the most widely used custom Android ROMs, and while it continues to do that, it has also teamed up with Oppo to release the first ever Google CTS certified CyanogenMod phone. Its not stopping there, it has teamed up with startup mobile manufacturer OnePlus, headed by an ex-Oppo VP, to develop a smartphone that’s built for CyanogenMod from the ground up. The startup announced today that the international release of its first smartphone, OnePlus One, takes place in the second quarter of 2014.

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OnePlus One International Release Slated For Q2, 2014 original content from Ubergizmo.

Cyanogen Inc., the makers of an alternative Android ROM that last year raised $30 million (in two chunks) in VC funding, from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, to try to turn what has generally been a geek project into something with more mainstream appeal, has named an official hardware partner for its endeavour.

Fittingly enough, this partner, OnePlus, is itself a startup — albeit, one founded by a person with experience of putting CyanogenMod on phones. Namely, former Oppo VP Pete Lau, who had been involved in bringing CyanogenMod to Chinese OEM Oppo’s N1 smartphone.

Lau has clearly decided to take that experience and apply it wholesale, in a new setting — where the effort isn’t an adjunct to business-as-usual Android handsets.

In a blog post announcing the news, OnePlus said: “The CyanogenMod team will work in tandem with us to combine the best hardware with the best software. They are developing a custom version of CyanogenMod with special features and tweaks.”

The first fruit of the partnership is going to be called the rather tongue-twisting OnePlus One. There’s precious little detail at this point about how the phone is going to differ from the N1 running CyanogenMod — not to mention stand out from the more-vanilla-Android crowd. But it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a mid-range device, with a pledge of “the latest and highest spec hardware” for the OnePlus One.

Other descriptors used are “fast, clean and beautiful”, which is all terribly non-specific so it’s a case of wait and see what the partnership delivers. The biggest trick the pair will have to pull off is making CyanogenMod attractive to a more mainstream user than has generally been the case thus far.

The OnePlus One is due to debut in the first half of this year, with a limited launch in “selected markets” initially, but with the aim of broadening availability down the line.

H/t to @whatthebit

[Image by Johan Larsson via Flickr]

We have been hearing rumors that the folks behind the CyanogenMod, Cyanogen Inc., are planning on launching a smartphone of their own. Well it turns out that the rumors are true as Cyanogen Inc. have announced it on their Google+ page, where they state, “We’re not quite ready to lift the veils but we can confirm that we have a new hardware partner!” As it stands Oppo has the Oppo N1 which is essentially an Android smartphone that runs CyanogenMod, as opposed to a custom UI cooked up by the folks at the company. However while the software might be Cyanogen, the hardware portion is more or less dictated by Oppo, and we can only imagine that Cyanogen’s own phone will see hardware and software controlled by them from start to end.

We had also heard about Oppo’s VP resignation where it was assumed that he would be joining Cyanogen in developing a smartphone of their own. If anything this is definitely something we’d like to see happening. While Google releases Android updates occasionally, manufacturers and carriers are usually pretty slow when it comes to updating their devices, despite the updates being available for months on end. Users typically resort to community driven efforts, such as CyanogenMod, in an effort to get the latest Android build for their devices which might not have otherwise been supported officially. So, who else is looking forward to seeing what kind of hardware Cyanogen will be able to put out there?

Cyanogen Inc. Teases Mysterious Hardware Partnership For Upcoming Smartphone original content from Ubergizmo.

Just last week we had heard the rumors that the folks behind the CyanogenMod custom ROM for Android phone, now known as Cyanogen Inc., were planning to launch a phone of their own. This would be different from the Oppo N1 which would come with the ROM preinstalled. Well now it looks like things are definitely starting to heat up because Oppo’s VP, Pete Lau, has recently announced that he will be resigning from Oppo and that today would be his last day at the company. His future plans include developing an online brand from scratch and his company’s first product will feature top hardware specs and will run the CyanogenMod ROM.

According to Lau’s Sina Weibo post (China’s equivalent of Twitter), they are “plotting on something that may change the world of Android,” and that they are working on creating the “perfect” Android flagship device. In any case while Oppo might be a brand known mostly in the Chinese market, CyanogenMod is a ROM used by countless Android users all over the world. Together with Lau’s knowledge and experience building smartphones, and with CyanogenMod’s massive following, it is possible that this “perfect” Android device could appeal to users all around the world. What do you guys think?

Oppo’s VP Resigns, Plans To Create The “Perfect” Android Smartphone With CyanogenMod original content from Ubergizmo.

As much as I love stock Android sometimes you just need something different, and that’s essentially been the guiding mission of the folks over at Cyanogen Inc.

They’ve made plenty of strides with their customized version of Android over the past few months, but now they’re on the verge of a big milestone – after officially revealing the thing back in September, Chinese OEM Oppo announced earlier today that its first Cyanogen-modded smartphone will launch internationally in December.

Wait, what? Who’s Oppo?

To really get a feel for what’s going on here, we need to flash back to mid-September. Cyanogen raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital at the time, and the company not-so-subtly hinted that it would forge partnerships with some honest-to-goodness smartphone makers to bring their modified version of Android to a wider audience than just avid phone tinkerers. That first hardware partner wound up being none other than Oppo, a curious Chinese OEM who may be best known for its Blu-ray players that has managed to cultivate a reputation for churning out some impressive (and impressively cheap) Android devices.

The specifics of the arrangement were… interesting, to say the least – Oppo developed its N1 smartphone in such a way that owners can easily flash Cyanogen’s custom Android build, but they’re also producing a limited quantity of those N1s that will ship to consumers with CyanogenMod pre-loaded onto them. It’s worth pointing out that the N1 is no slouch either – it sports among other things a 1.6GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 6-inch 1080p display, and what the company refers to as the world’s first rotating camera so a single camera module can handle selfies as well as it can landscapes.

Now this is a nice turn of events for Cyanogen fans but this launch could prove to be an important barometer for the Cyanogen team. The Cyanogen-laden version is being pegged as a limited edition release so Oppo isn’t going nuts churning these things out, so an international launch means that both companies will be better able to gauge the sort of demand for honest-to-goodness CyanogenMod phones. And this more widespread launch goes well, Oppo has that much more ammo in its arsenal if it tries to ink similar deals with other OEMs down the road.

That’s not to say the team can just call it a day though – one of their bigger priorities is to complete a dead-simple Cyanogen installer built so owners of existing Android devices can swap their current builds for something a little different. The Cyanogen team has been rounding up beta testers to work on early versions of the installer (which will ultimately wind up in the Google Play Store if everything goes according to plan), but only time will tell when Ma and Pa will be able to flash their smartphones without getting bogged down in the minutia.