300$ Pixel 3

The Google Pixel 3 is a great phone, with arguably the best camera of any other smart phone in 2018. However, the deep notch, several hardware issues or the price alone may be a serious deterrent for many. I recently found that the Pocophone F1, with some tinkering, can be a really good replacement. Uh, please note that this is not a very descriptive guide, just an outline to get you started and give a general outline of the procedure.

The Pixel 3 and the Pixel 3 XL.

Pocophone F1 is a pretty cheap Android based smartphone from Xiaomi. For 300$ (the price on Amazon as of today), you get 64GB memory, 6GB RAM and a pretty good camera (Main camera is Dual 12 MP f/1.9 + 5 MP f/2.0 - Front Camera: 20 MP f/2.0 - Video: 4K video, 30 fps & Slow motion video: 1080p, 240fps). And that’s a pretty good deal. But it comes with Xiaomi’s MIUI, which I have always hated. However, with some tinkering, you can get rid of it and run stock Android.

The Pocophone F1.

Unlocking the Bootloader

First step is to turn on USB debugging. Settings > About Phone > Tap on MiUI Version repeatedly to unlock developer options. Then turn on USB Debugging and OEM Unlock. Next, you need to unlock your phone. Go to the Xiaomi website [] > Unlock Now > Login to your account. Fill in the form and click on apply now. The process normally takes some days, but I have heard that you can speed up the process by:- a) Posting on the MiUI Developers forum and getting more points on your profile (source is my brother, dunno if this can be verified) b) Using an Mi Flash Tool (I haven’t tried this personally, but it looks promising) Login to your phone using the Mi Account: Settings > Mi Unlock Status > Add Account & Device. Connect the phone to a PC in fastboot by pressing and holding Volume Down and Power Button together. Clock Unlock button on PC and the phone will restart, with the bootloader unlocked.

Inside the Bootloader via Fastboot, with the Bugdroid under repair icon.

Installing Custom Recovery (TWRP)

Oh, I forgot to mention, you can lose your data at any stage of the whole process, so people usually install a custom recovery, to help with backups and stuff while installing and updating custom ROMs. One popular custom recovery is TWRP, it has a pretty slick UI and I find it easy to use. Flash it. Steps to flashing are pretty simple and involves placing the downloaded file in a specific location and running a couple of commands, so just google this part.

TWRP has a pretty nice UI.

Installing Custom Rom

Choose a custom ROM depending on your preference and factors like supported features, stability etc. You can find a lot of information regarding this on the XDA forums for the Poco. Lineage OS is pretty stable, I hear. The custom ROM that you downloaded must be placed in your phone memory, reboot into recovery and in TWRP, you get the option to flash it. Do so, clear the cache, system etc. (look this up, don’t clear everything blindly) and your phone will restart. Additionally, most ROMs do not come with Google apps, so they need to be downloaded separately. Check at the place you downloaded the ROM, they will give you a recommended set of Gapps and download the right one for you based on the platform, the Android version and the variant. I find it always better to flash the pico version and install everything else from the app store. Gapps needs to be flashed after the ROM. Additionally, you can flash a bunch of packages here to get your desired functionality, like Magisk for root, xPosed framework for Greenify and customizations etc.

Pick you poison. Your choice of custom ROMs.

Getting the Pixel Launcher and Google Camera

The main thing is still remaining. The Pixel launcher and the Google camera. You can get the Pixel launcher along with some of the ROMs you can download, or download it separately as an application. Just Google this.

Now this is a rumour I heard - Xiaomi is throttling the camera performance of the Pocophone through software to prevent it from competing with the Xiaomi flagships :O You can get around this, by installing Google’s camera (just Google this one), ported to the Pocophone (and other devices running Qualcomm Snapdragon and Exynos SoCs) by a Ukrainian developer B-S-G. The following features are working:- Portrait Mode (front and rear), HDR+, Video recording. And support is expected for the remaining features soon I guess. There are some bugs, but I saw the photos posted on XDA by an Indian dude who tested out the camera - and the results are really impressive.

And, voila. You have a 300$ Pixel 3. Enjoy guys.

And Pocophone is the new Pixel 3.