LeEco made a recent entry to the great indian smartphone market which has been seeing a whole range of budget smartphone launches every single week. LeEco formerly known as LETV entered India with two smartphones LeEco Le1S and Le Max. LeTV rebranded themselves to reflect its entry into a broader range of businesses like IOT-linked electric cars, smart cycles, and smartphones. LeEco is already a well established brand in China and now wants to do the same with Indian market by introducing their budget handset.
The Le1s, priced at INR 10,999 is focused at the budget consumer. This phone has an airplane grade aluminium body, fingerprint sensor and decent RAM/ROM looks very impressive on paper. Let’s find out how it works in the real world.
Here’s a honest Review after 1 month of usage.
As a gadget reviewer, my facebook feed is always flooded with posts from my fellow bloggers who review every single smartphone that’s ever launched in India. So the tech world was full a buzz about Le 1s when it was launched because they got it mostly right, the pricing, the performance and more.
Even though LeEco has only launched its first two smartphones in india at the time of writing this post. I can pretty firmly say that they are going to make a big dent in smartphone market in India. Initially I was sceptical about this company and its new range of devices but after a month of use as my primary device, my view has changed completely upside down.
To win the game in the affordable Android smartphone battle, a company must offer seamless performance, modern and sleek design with a decent battery life to last a day.
I’ve been using LeEco Le1s as my primary phone from a month and to see if it offers all this and more. And yes it does. Le 1s wins hands down and you’ll know why below.
Design and build quality.
Starting from the front, Le1s featured a 5.5 inch Full HD Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protected screen which looks very clean on the edges and compliments the overall design. LED nitifications, ambient light sensors and proximity sensors are neatly positioned on the top bezel and the bottom 3 capacitive have backlit. So there’s no compromise on any aspects in terms of front design.
On the back we have a primary camera with a single flash LED. Fingerprint sensor is placed in the center top, exactly where your fingers can reach them when you hold your phone. It may take a little while to get used to it, but it works seamlessly on the run.
3.5mm Headphone jack sits on the top along with the IR blaster for using your Le1s as a remote for your TV, AC, Set top box etc.
Dual Sim tray is placed on the side, one for micro sim and another for nano. Both slots support 4G. Volume rocker sits on the right side alongside the power and unlock button.
The bottom features a USB C type port on the bottom along with the loudspeaker on either sides.
Design Verdict:
On the design part, compromises are common in budget smartphones but Le1s makes the job of even the most brutal critic hard to find a flaw in terms of design.
What’s powering the performance of Le1s.
Inside you get a 2.2Ghz octa core Mediatek Helio processor with PowerVR G6200 GPU.
The best part is the 3GB LPDDR3 RAM and 32GB of internal storage which is unfortunately not expandable.With a lot of content and games to consume, it could have been better if there was an expandable storage.
How does Le1S satisfy the hidden Photographer in you.
1s gets a 13MP primary camera with ISOCell sensor with a single LED flash. f/2.0 aperture and Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) On the front, it’s a 5MP selfie camera with Samsung S5K5E2 sensor with 85-degree wide-angle lens.
Honestly, nothing much to complain. It took decent quality photos but not the best you get in the market. Still good for the price you pay. Camera focus is quick, daylight photography was fine. Low light shoot was not so impressive.
Video shooting with 4X slow motion video was great.
Here are some photos shot with Le1S.
Shot from a moving vehicle.
Shot from a moving vehicle.
Indoor Shot with low light.
Performance:
Heating levels of the metal body were high initially but the OTA update has fixed the heating problem considerably. Although I must say, it’s summer. The performance was satisfactory even when it’s loaded with 200 apps.
Audio department:
Audio quality was good enough with clear bass. Call quality was industry standard and loud enough to hear even during a heavy traffic, but the voice quality could have been better.
LeEco team deserves a pat of their back for mainly build quality, design and most importantly, the jaw dropping price to value ratio in the package.
Before the launch of this phone, a majority of tech bloggers in my circle who saw the specs sheet clearly thought that it would be priced somewhere between 15,000 to Rs.25000 price bracket. So LeEco’s pricing of Rs.10,999 was more than just a brilliant move and I can say, it definitely gives you more than what you pay for.
The LeEco Le 1S has clean design and good performance. At this price point, one could also consider the Moto G 3rd generation Rs.10,999 which offers a clean android user interface and Lenovo K4 Note (Rs.11,999) which does better it terms of camera.