When I last posted that I had plans for reviews in the works, I wanted to write two separate articles on what I am covering today. However, after having just a day to play with the TCL LX and LuneOS on a Nexus 5 … it became apparent that full reviews weren’t necessary. After further review, a theme was noticed that I want to address. Before I do so:
TCL LX
Who likes a cheap smart phone for current retail price of $14.99 that can handle the basics? I bought this last year when it was on sale for $30, and yeah, after finally playing with it, its worth that price.
Pros
During my <4 hours playing with it on and off, I did find some goodness:
- Good build quality – Though the phone is cheap with cut corners, I cannot fault the build quality of the phone itself. It feels solid in hand, some extra attention was paid to the back plate (glossy except for diagonal “grip” lines on the back with the TCL logo exempted from these lines), and has a nice heft to it. I do like holding it.
- Decent communication specs – Bluetooth and WiFi was solid, and it has a 3.5 mm headphone port. Did not put my sim card in to check network performance, but wouldn’t be surprised if that was decent, too.
Cons
Even with some goodness, there were major cuts to corners to make this low-low price:
- Performance – Performance on this phone was not okay, getting into the “meh” territory a few times, depending on what was happening. It did not feel snappy, nor happy.
- OS – For all intents and purposes, this phone is running a vanilla version of Android Oreo 8.1 minus some tweaks here and there (camera software, an app or two for the MVNO it is attached to, etc.). Normally, fine. However, for some reason app updates were not going through the Google Play Store, which is bad. Also, for some odd reason it couldn’t connect to an OS upgrade server. Not sure why this would be other than I do not have service through this phone; this is the only time on any carrier that I have had this issue, and perplexes me.
- Screen – The worst corner cut: This is not a modern touch screen, it is akin to a 2010 or earlier touch screen. The screen glass and the the screen itself isn’t laminated (kinda meh in general), but the distance between both layers is on the order of an 1/8 or 1/16 of an inch, a very large distance that results in very muted colors when viewed head on, and when viewed off angle is either very saturated or very blanched, with parts of the screen disappearing when viewed in any angle. The effect is reminiscent of crappy TN panels on laptops. It … just isn’t any good … at all. This from a company known for making highly regarded TVs!
Overall / Final Conclusions
To be honest, this phone would be perfectly usable as a cheap .mp3 player with Bluetooth and WiFi for when you don’t want to use a smartphone for such tasks. With this bad of a screen, I couldn’t see this being used on a regular basis as an honest-to-God everyday smartphone/communication tool unless you really don’t have the money or can’t save up for a better phone.
LuneOS
Background
WebOS was always something I had an interest in playing around with, but I never was able to get an HP Pre (and definitely not the fire-sale TouchPad) before then-owner HP killed all phone development, including an improved & large-screened phone. I did buy a used HP Veer, a very, very, small phone that was impressive for what it could do for the size, and not much else. CUTE, but nothing special. It wasn’t speedy, and didn’t exactly have the apps that I would want, even at that time.
I still kept my wistfulness for this OS. As I grew to love Windows Phone and then watch it die a slow death, playing with Android as it grew on phones I loved, I wondered what WebOS brought to the table while hearing of the features both Android and iOS “stole” from it. A couple of years ago, I decided to go in on an open source variant, LuneOS, on my Google Nexus 4, to some delight and not anything more. I quickly moved away from it to other Android ROMs.
A few weeks ago, I came across a video showing LuneOS running on the Linux phone Pinephone. This made me want to try it again, and I saw that they had support for the Nexus 5, so I thought, sure, let’s try this again.
All this to say that I put this OS on my Nexus 5 today and 2 hours later I wondered what rabbit hole I delved into.
A Road Paved with Good Intentions
I need to preface my experience with this OS by saying that webos-ports.org, where all information needed to install it on a target phone, states that this is alpha and beta testing images, with a large list of understandings at the top of the installation instructions page that make it quite clear this isn’t meant for normal/daily use. I’ll touch on this later with my thoughts about it, but this is definitely not for >95% of people.
The easiest part of putting LuneOS Eggnog Latte onto the Nexus 5 was to download the image and the recovery needed for a rooted phone. It was *much* harder to find a CyanogenMod 12.1 ROM for the Nexus 5, though, and it took up half of the time I spent with this phone. If I wasn’t at my family’s place, I may have had a ROM on my home laptop, but I had no choice but to use my Google-fu to get what I needed. Why the hassle? If you’re not aware, CyanogenMod evolved/”forked” into LineageOS due to issues with the main developer. This had the unfortunate effect that, while its easy to find official LineageOS ROMs on their website, all development stopped on the CyanogenMod ROMs and most developers dropped it from their repositories. Once I finally found the correct ROM, I was all installed within half an hour messing with command prompt commands and a little bit of confusion (thoughts also later).
What did I get when everything was finally sorted? A nice looking UI that wasn’t as fast as I know the phone can be with some major bugs that would keep me from using it going forward.
- Screen Backlight – So, why is it that after 2-3 mins of use, the screen backlight turns off during use and the brightness control is either absent or ineffective?? This irritated me a lot, especially the first time as I had no idea why it was doing this.
- App Installation – While there is an app store of sorts for this OS, the installer would lie about installing an app. Literally lie. It would say it installed the app, but I would go to the app drawer and I would not find the app. Not sure how this happened, but I don’t know if there is a fix, either.
- UI Responsiveness – This phone worked quite well with Android 6.0.1, and if memory serves quite well with higher-level ROMs, but on LuneOS it is barely faster than the HP Veer. How?
Conclusions
So, I played with alpha/beta software. Not surprised as I saw the warnings, and so I’m not really angry or miffed about it. The community that follows development of this OS likely understands the unfinished & unpolished aspects as well, considering that the developers do not have a timeline for when they roll out updates, and that there hasn’t been any incremental updates since this latest version was posted. With it being a Linux-based OS, riding the CyanogenMod kernel, I’m kinda not surprised that some items didn’t work well, but would have thought some of these issues would have been fixed in prior releases, or if they cropped up with this release that there would have been patches already.
Limits
Both the TCL LX and LuneOS are duds. In a sense, both are trying to go down a rabbit hole of diminishing results. For the LX, TCL’s rabbit hole was to make as large a profit as possible while still making a very cheap phone. LuneOS doesn’t appear to have enough resources to allow it to appeal to broader audiences outside of WebOS die hards. Are they really worth it?
Yes.
For the TCL LX it’s a disposable product for those wanting a burner phone, a phone for a kid or just needing something right now while waiting for a phone to be repaired or similar. For LuneOS, it is a weekend passion project for devoted developers and users. Both have a purpose. Only the future holds whether these have worth to you.
Amatuer Techy 