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Le 1s Review
by Jamshed Avari
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LeEco ( the company formerly known as LeTV) is the latest to join the long, long list of Chinese smartphone manufacturers trying their luck in India. The company doesn’t have any of the advantages of being an early mover, and no matter how shockingly low it can push prices, it won’t be the first to be doing so. Still, there’s a lot to like about the Le 1s, which is quite full of interesting features considering its budget price tag.
LeEco hasn’t gone only for impressive specifications; it’s clearly trying to achieve a level of desirability, as you can immediately see from the Le 1s’s metal body. While the much more expensive Le Max ( Review | Pictures) took on the might of mainstream flagships and came up looking just a little short, LeEco is hoping that the Le 1s will have much wider appeal.
Look and feel
There’s only so far you can go with specifications, and so LeEco has decided to bring premium materials and build quality to the budget smartphone space. The Le 1s is made almost entirely of metal, save for two plastic strips running along the top and bottom of the rear for the various antennas to work. The strips are certainly noticeable, but not as prominent as the plastic antenna lines on the iPhone 6 and 6s series, for example, so some might actually prefer this.
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The front face is pretty slick, with black glass surrounding the screen and extending all the way to the two sides. The front camera and sensor window are arranged symmetrically on either side of the earpiece. There are the standard three capacitive Android navigation buttons below the screen, but they’re hidden until you tap one, at which point they all light up. The metal band running around the sides has chamfered edges, but the Le 1s manages to avoid looking like an iPhone 5overall thanks to its proportions.
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The primary camera and flash are in one corner of the rear, and there’s a silver mirror-finished fingerprint sensor lower down and in the middle. It looks great but is actually a bit slippery, so we’ll have to see if form and function are balanced. The company obviously didn’t manage to time its rebranding with its India launch, so our test unit had a large LeTV logo - units sold here in the future might say LeEco instead, though we can’t be certain about that.
The power and volume buttons are on the right, as expected, and a tray with cutouts for one Nano-SIM and one Micro-SIM is on the left. There’s a standard 3.5mm audio socket on top, accompanied by a very non-standard IR emitter. Much more noteworthy is the Type-C USB port on the bottom. Type-C will undoubtedly begin displacing Micro-USB this year but LeEco is still ahead of the curve here. The primary disadvantage is that you won’t be able to use any of the USB cables you currently have lying around.
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In a very interesting twist, the company ships a non-standard USB cable with a modified type-A plug on the charger end. It works like any other USB cable, except that you don’t have to worry about which way is up. In order to achieve this, the plug’s inner tongue has been made really thin, and we hope it won’t snap.
The gold finish isn’t for everyone, but that’s the only option at the moment on Flipkart, the exclusive retailer. Grip is decent for a phone with a 5.5-inch screen, though one-handed usage is still awkward. The Le 1s weighs 169g but somehow manages not to feel that heavy even with prolonged usage.
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Specifications and software
Rather than the Qualcomm processors that have become commonplace in this segment, LeEco has chosen the MediaTek Helio X10, also known as the MT6795T. This is a pretty powerful chip, with eight cores clocked at up to 2.2GHz and integrated PowerVR G6200 graphics. There’s also 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, which is sadly not expandable.
The 5.5-inch screen has a resolution of 1080x1920 which is now standard at this price level. There’s a 13-megapixel camera on the rear and a 5-megapixel one in front. Unfortunately, the 3000mAh battery is sealed in. 4G is supported across both SIM cards, and there’s also Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.1, and A-GPS. FM radio appears to be missing.