Android on PC — A Brief Look at PhoenixOS

Preface

I actually prepared this brief review of PhoenixOS several months ago. At the time I had just seen news that the official version of Android 7.0 x86 had just been released, so I downloaded and installed it, and the result.....the experience was terrible = =, those 4 characters are the only way to describe it. But since I was trying Android x86, I couldn't leave disappointed, so I installed and tried PhoenixOS, a well-known Chinese OS deeply customized based on Android x86.

This article does not cover how to install it, because the installation process is very simple. If needed, I'll write a separate installation tutorial.

A Brief Look

Boot loader. PhoenixOS uses Grub just like other Linux distributions

Boot screen

Hadn't booted it in a long time; as soon as I did, it prompted me to update the system

Gallery

Desktop It still looks pretty nice; the overall style is similar to Windows

Notification bar Has a bit of that imitating-Win10-Notification-Center vibe.

Settings screen PhoenixOS rewrote Android's native Settings, but there's a toggle button in the upper-right corner of the settings screen. I won't screenshot it, though, because the native settings interface is really kind of ugly.

Game Assistant Playing games is probably one of PhoenixOS's major features. Compared with a whole bunch of Android emulators, this native system should have more of an advantage when gaming on a PC.

App Center Not much to say—the various Android emulators in China all have this too, making it convenient to install apps and games.

Built-in text editor The interface is well designed and fits computer users' operating habits well. Personally it feels a bit like 超卓编辑器.

File manager This one deserves a thumbs-up; the interface looks great. It's somewhat similar to the file managers on ordinary Linux distros. I think this one is closer to Gnome's file manager.

Calendar The display is relatively small, and fullscreen seems to have a slight display issue. Not much to comment on.

App split-screen Similar to desktop systems like Windows: drag a window to the left or right edge to split the screen. Very comfortable.

Multi-window mode You can treat PhoenixOS as a desktop system; switching among multiple windows is no problem at all.

Menu/drawer

Input method switching Very much like Windows and Linux; switching input methods is convenient, though there probably aren't many input methods adapted for the keyboard.

Help Center The help center even has a search function. Nice.

Menu/drawer after going fullscreen The frosted-glass effect looks pretty nice

Built-in browser This browser is quite good. They clearly put real work into optimizing it for computer use, so using it feels close to a desktop system. There are still some small shortcomings, but since this is only a brief look, I won't analyze them in depth.

Finally, the power menu Feels similar to MIUI. The background still uses the frosted-glass effect. Nice.

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