In 2019, a little known company by the name of F(x)tec released the Pro 1, a modern take on the QWERTY phones of yesteryear. For a second act, the company is teaming up with XDA Developers, a community of mobile software developers, to release the Pro1-X. How do you top a phone with a QWERTY keyboard? By creating a follow-up that can run three different operating systems out of the box, including LineageOS.
If you’re not familiar with LineageOS, it’s an alternative take on Android that adds additional features and customization options to the mix. It came out of the ashes of Cyanogen. Both projects have their roots in the XDA community. You have to go back to a phone like the OnePlus One to find a device that shipped with a community-based version of Android. It’s also possible to configure the Pro1-X with Ubuntu Touch OS and plain old Android. The former, as the name suggests, is the mobile version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.