GPS and aGPS: GPS works well even without aGPS. aGPS can be enabled in the settings
Affordability: Great price for the hardware and support provided
Compatibility: 3/5
Camera Support:
Libcamera: Not supported
Megapixels: Not supported
v4l2: Supported
Gstreamer: Supported
Qcamera: Supported
Battery Life: 5/5
Setup information
OS: FuriOS 13.0.3
Kernel: 4.19.233
DE: Phosh
Performance
The FLX1 is a fast phone in general. The Mediatek Dimensity 900 is a fast SOC especially compared to the pinephone/pinephone pro/librem 5 devices. It comes with 6GB of RAM , which is more than enough for most tasks but can be limiting. Web browsing and media playback are fast and smooth. Android container is fully supported so acceleration works well and the performance is great. There are some acceleration issues with flatpak qt6 based applications, so they are set to software rendering. Flatpak qt5/gtk4 and native qt5/qt6/gtk4 are all accelerated without issues.
Compatibility
The FLX1 is a halium based device so it is limiting to what OS/DE you can run on it. Currently FuriOS is the only supported OS, but someone can create a port for UT. You wont be able to run any of the other mainline OS though like arch and postmarketos. For desktop environments (DE) you are also limited to Phosh and Lomiri. Plasma mobile has a fork that someone was able to get it working on droidian devices but it is not officially supported. Every app that I've tested so far was launched and worked correctly, bearing the HW acceleration issues.
Android
Android support is amazing with lots of sensors passed through to the container, listed below. While Waydroid was used a base, it has been heavily modified to improve the experience and has deviating massively from waydroid so I will just adress it as Android Container. You should be able to run most android applications without any issues, including games. Currently video playback is broken, but there is already a patch avaliable that fixes most issues and I can confirm Grayjay works. Android also integrated perfectly with the rest of the OS. All your android applications show up in the app drawer. Theres a android section in the phosh settings that exposes a lot of android settings to the user. The current implementation of the settings panel (as shown below) is going through a redesign.
Sensors passed to Android
Sensor
Passed through
GPS
Cameras
Microphone
Bluetooth
Modem
NFC
Fingerprint Sensor
Accelerometer
Geomagnetic
Orientation
Gyroscope
Light
Pressure
Proximity
Gravity
Linear Acceleration
Rotation Vector
Step Counter
Means currently WIP
Docking
The FLX1 isn't currently able to output video via the usb c port due to the lack of hardware support. They are currently working on a wireless solution like what UT has with Miracast. This would limit you to only using Miracast compatible devices such as the Nexdock Wireless or using a Miracast dongle. This is still not available yet though so only time will tell how well it works.
Web Browsing
Web browsing works really well and I haven't ran into any issues with firefox yet. Firefox is a custom build that they maintain internal with improvements to performance and scaling to make it more mobile friendly. Due to it being a custom build it is possible for it to fall behind a few releases due to issues in new releases but so far they are on top of it and the changes are amazing. Based on benchmarking results with speedometer 3.0 either firefox or epiphany work but I would recommend firefox. Angelfish doesn't work at all.
Browser
Score
Version
Toolkit
Method
Firefox
2.28 ± 0.17
128.0.3
Gecko
Repo
Angelfish
N/A
24.08.0
Chromium
Flatpak
Epiphany
2.12 ± 0.054
46.3
WebKit
Flatpak
Media Playback
Below is a table of different video codecs and their playback performance. Based on the results you should be using MPV as much as possible as it has the best performance and compatability. The hardware has support for decoding h264/h265/vp9 and they are working on adding in the software support necessary.
Player Information
Player
Version
Method
MPV
0.38.0
Repo
Clapper
0.6.1
Flatpak
Livi
0.2.0
Flatpak
H.264/AVC
Resolution
FPS
Player
Realtime Playback
Hardware Acceleration
1080p
30
MPV
1080p
30
Clapper
1080p
30
Livi
720p
30
MPV
720p
30
Clapper
720p
30
Livi
H.265/HEVC
Resolution
FPS
Player
Realtime Playback
Hardware Acceleration
1080p
30
MPV
1080p
30
Clapper
1080p
30
Livi
720p
30
MPV
720p
30
Clapper
720p
30
Livi
AV1
Resolution
FPS
Player
Realtime Playback
Hardware Acceleration
1080p
30
MPV
1080p
30
Clapper
1080p
30
Livi
720p
30
MPV
720p
30
Clapper
720p
30
Livi
VP9
Resolution
FPS
Player
Realtime Playback
Hardware Acceleration
1080p
30
MPV
1080p
30
Clapper
1080p
30
Livi
720p
30
MPV
720p
30
Clapper
720p
30
Livi
Close to real-time playback, few dropped frames in heavy scenes only
Camera
The phone does not support libcamera or megapixels like other linux phones. Instead it has it's own camera stack that exposes the cameras out via v4l, gstreamer and qcamera. This allows it to be used universally by other applications for video chatting such as through firefox. The camera quality is really good and the processing is instant. The camera application also opens up instantly allowing you to quickly capture a moment. It is also capable of taking video with audio in sync. The phone has 3 camera sensors and all them are supported and exposed. There is no advance mode to manually control WB, ISO, codec, etc. It does have tap to adjust though and the auto focus/wb/iso works really well.
Temp
Kelvin
Led
Normal
5000k
B35AM
Low
2500k
519A 3500K dedome
Light
Description
Medium
Convoy S21B 3rd click pointed at ceiling
Low
Emisar DW4 Minimum brightness. Ceiling for superman. Direct from distance for color checker
Superman Normal Temp Medium Light
FLX1
Pixel 6
iPhone 12
Superman Low Temp Low Light
FLX1
Pixel 6 (6 sec)
iPhone 12 (3 sec)
Color Normal Temp Medium Light
FLX1
Pixel 6
iPhone 12
Color Low Temp Low Light
FLX1
Pixel 6
iPhone 12 (3 seconds)
Battery Life
The phone has great battery life with the screen on and on standby. Standby is also different from the mainline devices as it does not use deep sleep. Instead it uses a low power mode that still allows network activity. This allows you to ssh in at anytime and continue to receive notifications from web based apps.
Testing was done using the following settings:
Screen brightness set to 50%
Screen timeout disabled
Measured from 100% battery to device shutdown
With and without android running in the background
Method
Battery Life
Screen on
10.54 hours
Screen on + Android
10 hours
mpv 720p Video Playback
6.11 hours
Stress cpu
5.33 hours
Stress cpu + Android
5.38 hours
Standby
3.55 Days
Standby + Android
2.79 Days
Support
Support from FuriLabs has been outstanding. They are all constantly in the telegram group so when issues are discovered by endusers and they mention it in the chat they are able to immediately replicate it on their side so they can troubleshoot and fix it. They also have a great system to allow users to test fixes similar to Ubuntu Touch where there is a new repository for each fix that the user can install and uninstall. While UT requires the user to use the terminal to install said repository the FuriLabs folks have instead decided to create a GUI so even users that are terminal shy can test fixes. Overall getting ahold of them and getting software support from them is amazing but I have yet to interact with them when it comes to hardware defects so I can't comment on their warranty experience.
Conclusion
This is a great device for the price, performance and support. It is constantly getting new improvements and updates are usually released monthly. The phone is great to use and the battery life is amazing. The camera is good and better than all mainline linux phones. The only downside is the lack of software support for other OSes and DEs but that is expected with a halium devices. The docking situation is a bummer but will hopefully improve in the future. Even with those caveats it is still a great device to use and I would 100% recommend it to anyone looking for a linux phone that is usable.
