One of the few surface-level interface extras in the OnePlus 2’s Oxygen UI is called Shelf. In here you should see an App Drawer Grid Size entry that will allow you to fiddle with the App menu. To do this, hold a finger down on an empty part of a homescreen and then tap Settings in the menu that pops up. You can increase the app drawer size to 6 x 5 icons, or decrease it to 4 x 3 we think the latter looks a little silly on a 5.5in screen. One of the best semi-hidden bits is being able to control how many apps are crammed into the Apps menu. Not all of the OnePlus 2’s customisations are readily visible from a quick glance at the Settings menu. Power user? You can fit more apps into the menu Those worth checking out include Camera MX and Camera FV-5 – although the latter kept crashing for us on the OnePlus 2. There are many other great camera apps out there too some free, others paid-for. The vanilla Google Camera app feels more intuitive to us, although it also lacks some important features such as HDR (not that the OnePlus HDR mode is very good). We recommend ditching it for something a better – at least until OnePlus fine-tunes the app with an update. It appears to be based on the standard Google Camera app, but it has a more fiddly interface. On the whole, the OnePlus 2 features pretty tasteful software. You can switch the Recent Apps and Back buttons in Settings | Buttons | Swap Buttons. OnePlus deliberately uses generic icons on the OnePlus 2 soft keys for that eventuality. If that’s the case, you can always swap the soft keys over. However, if you have smaller hands then you may find the Back button soft key difficult to reach. All 5.5in phones are reasonably large, but this one is also a little chunky at 9.9mm thick. One of the potential issues of the OnePlus 2 is that it’s of a generous size. Swap the Back and Apps buttons if you find the phone a bit large You’ll find these options in Settings | Customization | LED Notifications. However, you can pick between eight different shades for “battery charging”, “battery low”, “battery full” and the notification alert. You can’t set different colours for different people, or different kinds of notification. While most phone LEDs appear either white, green or red, they’re generally multi-colour lights that can shine in any shade of the rainbow. However, not all of them let you customise the colour used by the LED. This is nothing too special: lots of phones have one. The OnePlus 2 has a notification LED that sits up by the front-facing camera. You’ll find the colour-selection screen in Settings | Customization | Accent Color. This colour is then pasted over the menu “accents”, which basically means the icons in the menu system and, more important, the colour used in the dropdown notifications bar. While only a few colours look particularly clear against a pure white display (yellow isn’t so good, for example), just about all of them stand out against black. Switch to the dark side and you also benefit from far more control over the colour scheme of the system. The dark theme also gives you more control over the look Right up at the top of this screen you’ll see a switch that flicks between Dark mode and the Normal mode. You can switch between dark and light themes in Settings | Customization. But it does give you another look to play with. Since the phone uses an LCD screen rather than a more dynamic OLED version, you won’t see a radical uplift in battery life. The Oxygen UI used in the OnePlus 2 looks pretty similar to Android Lollipop, but you can flip it over so that white interface elements such as the apps menu and settings menus turn black. Feast your eyes on our OnePlus 2 tips and tricks. We’ve been living with the phone for a while now with our review on the way and here’s what we’ve found so far. Scratch below the surface, though, and you’ll find a whole world of tweaks and extras. It’s also jam-packed with features and customisations, many of which are hidden from the top layer of the software to keep everything looking and running smoothly. It’s hard to buy, it’s made by a maverick brand and, well, it’s pretty great too. The OnePlus 2 is the ultimate scenester phone for 2015. Managed to grab a OnePlus 2? Here’s how to make the most of the smartphone taking on Apple, Samsung, LG and the rest
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