Build and Design: 9/10
When placed side-by-side on their backs, you will not be able to tell the Le 2 and Le 1s apart. It is only when you start looking closely that the differences in the design language pop up. LeEco continues using a metal body for the Le 2, which gives it a slight heft with a 153 gram weight. The front face has the 5.5-inch full HD display. We got the rose gold variant of the phone.
On the rear is where you will see differences. For starters, the first thing that stands out are the antenna cuts on the top and bottom. The 16MP camera unit protrudes slightly and occupies a position in the centre, beside which you have the dual-tone LED flash unit. Just below the camera module, you have the square shaped fingerprint scanner. On the button edge, you have the USB Type-C port which acts as a data transfer and charging port as well as a CDLA port for digital audio.
The top portion has an IR blaster, the dual nano SIM card tray is on the left whereas the volume rocker and power button is on the right-hand side. There are antenna cuts on the bottom edge as well. The dropping of the 3.5mm audio jack is a bit too ambitious for a phone at this price range, but thankfully, LeEco bundles in a USB Type C earphone and a Type-C to 3.5mm audio jack converter, for those who prefer using their regular earphones.
Overall, the build quality is quite good, although the edges around the display are a bit too sharp despite the bevelling. This is compensated well by the transparent silicon cover you get. It also compensates for the bulge in the camera module. The silicon cover gives a good grip, although we didn’t find the metal body to be that slippery.
Features: 9/10
LeEco Le 2 comes with a really good feature set, as has been the case with its first generation outing as well. The Le 2 houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chipset which has an octa-core processor with one quad-core Cortex A72 cluster clocked at 1.8GHz and one quad-core Cortex A53 cluster clocked at 1.8GHz. It is paired with an Adreno 510 GPU. It also comes with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage ( 29.12GB available to the user) — you cannot add in a microSD card to expand the storage though.
The 5.5-inch Full HD display comes comes with an LCD panel. On the camera front, you get a 16MP sensor on the rear camera with an f/2.0 aperture and phase-detect AF along with an 8MP front-facing camera with an f/2.2 aperture and 1.4 micrometer pixel size.
It runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow along with LeEco’s proprietary EUI 5.8 skin atop it. There is a nano dual-SIM tray which supports 4G LTE ( FDD LTE Bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/20 and TDD LTE Bands 38/40/41) . There’s also support for Wi-fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS/AGPS with GLONASS and BDS positioning, a fingerprint sensor on the rear and more. All this is powered by a 3, 000mAh battery which supports the QuickCharge standard.
Display: 10/10
The 5.5-inch in-cell display on the LeEco Le 2 seems quite similar to what we had seen on the Le 1s. It offers the same 400 ppi pixel density on the Le 2s. The display is sharp and colours appear natural, although with a slight bias towards the blue spectrum. The phone is sufficiently bright, although the adaptive brightness feature isn’t the best. There were some concerns regarding some creaking sound that’s heard when you tap on the phone — we found that to be true only when you press hard on the display, as hard as you would on a 3D Touch panel on the iPhone. In normal use cases you will not press that hard on the display. Watching movies on the display is a pleasure. Although the contrast isn’t the best, we still found it to be quite good.
Software: 9/10
LeEco comes with the proprietary EUI skin atop Android 6.0 Marshmallow. In terms of the design language, it is not very different from the user interface seen on the first generation LeEco handsets. There is no app drawer, so all apps that you download are on multiple homescreens.
Swiping to the leftmost homescreen, you com beat performance.