Color OS or CyanogenMod for your Android smartphone?

The Oppo N1 smartphone is equipped with a large 5.9 inch display, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor and a rather unique 13MP camera that rotates to face the front or back of the device.

Perhaps most importantly, the handset is also available with a choice of two tasty Android flavors: Oppo’s Color OS or CyanogenMod.

Additional specs are fairly basic, including a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 2GB of RAM and 16GB-32GB of storage.

As Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, Color OS is a custom version of Android which supports touchscreen gestures such as using a three-finger swipe to open the camera.

“There’s a touch-sensitive area on the back of the phone that you can use to control certain apps. For example, you could skip tracks while using a media player by swiping the back of the phone,” Linder explained.

“CyanogenMod is also a custom version of Android — but it’s one that started its life as a tweaked version of Android Open Source Project software developed by hobbyists. Earlier this year the lead developers formed a company and started looking for hardware partners to team up with and Oppo is the first.”

The Oppo N1 smartphone – which launches this month in China – is slated to hit US and European shores in December.

Pricing? $599 in the US and €449 in Europe.