OnePlus One: A Week Of ROMs
In the last week, I have had six different ROMs on my OnePlus One; Resurrection Remix, Exodus, Paranoid Android, Dirty Unicorns, BlissPop and Pacman ROM. I will be comparing them to each other, and telling you which one I would ultimately use as a daily driver.
I started my adventure with Resurrection Remix. This ROM was the most customisable out of the five by a long way, but these features didn’t mean a compromise on performance. It even helped me get my highest ever score on AnTuTu Benchmark – just over a whopping 50,000!
From just being able to change the colour of my status bar when battery saver mode was active, to being able to open notifications in a popup app window, this ROM is packed full of features, and although some were obsolete to me, many of them served a useful purpose. I felt that the ROM’s in-built theme pack needed some work, and the battery life, although not great, was generally enough to see me through a day’s use of medium usage, with the SoT clocking up at just over 5 hours before a charge was needed.
My next ROM was Paranoid Android. This was a much more stock feel to Android, which, I have to say, I don’t enjoy. Customisations were better than on stock, but it was lacking in many areas for me. This may seem a great ROM to a normal stock user, but to someone used to a plethora of features in a custom ROM, I was left somewhat disappointed. My disappointment was backed up by an AnTuTu score of 45k, and some general stutters when completing simple tasks, even when not many background tasks were running.
This ROM was, overall, not what I had hoped it would be. Although battery life was very good, with me getting 6 hours of SoT comfortably, The good battery life was just not a good enough compromise for the lack of features.
My third venture was Exodus. This ROM immediately called out to me with two things; one good, and one bad. The option to add a performance profile dial in the quick settings bar was something I had missed in Resurrection and Paranoid, and I was immediately drawn to it. The other standout feature, or rather lack of one, was the missing presence of a file manager. Now, I know that it’s easily sorted by the play store, but it was very surprising to see a custom ROM without a built-in file manager.
The performance was far from sluggish, with an AnTuTu score of 49k, and stuttering only when over 15 apps were open in the background at the same time. Battery life wasn’t bad either, with just under 4 hours of gaming, and 5 hours of SoT before a charge was required.
There were more Customisations in the ROM than in paranoid, but I still felt that it was lacking compared to Resurrection. The ROM has to be commended, though, for its ‘morph’ settings, which can give you either a more stock feel, or a more Cyanogenmod feel to the UI. By this point, though, Resurrection was still winning by quite a distance
The 4th experience was Pacman ROM. This ROM immediately pulled me in with its clean, well made boot animation. This really set the tone for what is a very polished ROM. Once again, I was offered a huge selection of customisations, including anytime gestures and an always accessible app bar. There was also a built in Kernel Auditor, which let you set the frequency of CPUs, control the CPU throttle temperature, and so much more. One thing about this ROM, though: On the version that I installed, SuperSU didn’t come included, so I had to flash it in myself. Hopefully, in future builds, this will be resolved.
Performance was also something to beat: I was left extremely happy with the smoothness of general use, even when I had over 10 apps running in the background. This was backed up by a very surprising AnTuTu score of only 43K! (And this is why people say that benchmarks don’t replicate real-life performance). Overall, this ROM was the biggest challenger I had seen compared to Resurrection so far, in performance, features, and battery life, with a comfortable 4 hours of gaming before a charge was needed.
My penultimate ROM was Dirty Unicorns. This ROM was heavily recommended to me on instagram by a few users, stating that I had to try it. It is also a favourite of some of the Techdependent team. I have to say, I felt that their praises were well deserved. Their own AudioFX app just didn’t cut it for me, however, as it just wasn’t as easy to use, or look at.
Its customisability was well ranged, offering status bar and nav bar changes, and many accessibility shortcuts. The score in AnTuTu was not bad; a respectable 46k, which was backed up by a solid real-time performance, which only faltered when 12 apps were open. This was the smoothest ROM excluding Resurrection, and the battery life pulled a great 4.5 hours of Gaming!
Last, but certainly not least, was BlissPop ROM. By this point, I was skeptical that anything would be able to surpass resurrection remix, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Customisability matches, maybe even surpasses, that of resurrection remix, and performance isn’t bad either. After racking up a not-too-shabby 47k on AnTuTu, I struggled to make this ROM work hard. It took 16 apps running in the background to start seeing a noticeable drop in performance. The battery life almost reached 5 hours of SoT, but faltered with only minutes to spare.
All in all, I think that I shall be using BlissPop as my daily driver for the next month or so. It’s just an all round beast of a ROM – it’s packed with features, but that doesn’t mean a compromise on performance or battery life, like there was in some other ROMs.
The great thing about android is that the community of users is full of keen developers, so by the time I next go ROM hunting, there’s bound to be new projects to try out in the near future. In the meantime, the links to all the official ROM websites are below, so if you want to try one out, you can!
Resurrection Remix: http://www.resurrectionremix.com/
Dirty Unicorns: http://forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-one/orig-development/rom-dirty-unicorns-bacon-t3077755
Exodus: http://www.vanir-exodus.net/
Paranoid Android: http://www.paranoidandroid.co/
Pacman: http://www.pac-rom.com/#Home
BlissPop: http://www.blissroms.com/
