Furilabs FLX1

Luigi311 September 16, 2024 #Phones #Furilabs #Halium

Setup information

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

SensorPassed through
GPS Yes
Cameras Yes
Microphone Yes
Bluetooth Maybe
Modem Maybe
NFC Yes
Fingerprint Sensor Yes
Accelerometer Yes
Geomagnetic Yes
Orientation No
Gyroscope Yes
Light Yes
Pressure Yes
Proximity Yes
Gravity No
Linear Acceleration No
Rotation Vector No
Step Counter No

Maybe 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.

BrowserScoreVersionToolkitMethod
Firefox2.28 ± 0.17128.0.3GeckoRepo
AngelfishN/A24.08.0ChromiumFlatpak
Epiphany2.12 ± 0.05446.3WebKitFlatpak

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

PlayerVersionMethod
MPV0.38.0Repo
Clapper0.6.1Flatpak
Livi0.2.0Flatpak

H.264/AVC

ResolutionFPSPlayerRealtime PlaybackHardware Acceleration
1080p30MPV Yes No
1080p30Clapper No No
1080p30Livi No No
720p30MPV Yes No
720p30Clapper No No
720p30Livi Yes No

H.265/HEVC

ResolutionFPSPlayerRealtime PlaybackHardware Acceleration
1080p30MPV Yes No
1080p30Clapper No No
1080p30Livi No No
720p30MPV Yes No
720p30Clapper No No
720p30Livi No No

AV1

ResolutionFPSPlayerRealtime PlaybackHardware Acceleration
1080p30MPV Yes No
1080p30Clapper No No
1080p30Livi No No
720p30MPV Yes No
720p30Clapper No No
720p30Livi Maybe No

VP9

ResolutionFPSPlayerRealtime PlaybackHardware Acceleration
1080p30MPV Yes No
1080p30Clapper No No
1080p30Livi Yes No
720p30MPV Yes No
720p30Clapper No No
720p30Livi Yes No

Maybe 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.

TempKelvinLed
Normal5000kB35AM
Low2500k519A 3500K dedome
LightDescription
MediumConvoy S21B 3rd click pointed at ceiling
LowEmisar DW4 Minimum brightness. Ceiling for superman. Direct from distance for color checker

Superman Normal Temp Medium Light

FLX1Pixel 6iPhone 12

Superman Low Temp Low Light

FLX1Pixel 6 (6 sec)iPhone 12 (3 sec)

Color Normal Temp Medium Light

FLX1Pixel 6iPhone 12

Color Low Temp Low Light

FLX1Pixel 6iPhone 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:

MethodBattery Life
Screen on10.54 hours
Screen on + Android10 hours
mpv 720p Video Playback6.11 hours
Stress cpu5.33 hours
Stress cpu + Android5.38 hours
Standby3.55 Days
Standby + Android2.79 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 termianl 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.