Barely a few months after
entering India with the extremely tempting Le 1s, Chinese juggernaut LeEco has
begun pushing a slightly lower priced version with pretty much the same features, but a couple
of interesting changes. The phone has been launched as a vehicle for the
company's new content and services effort, called LeEco Membership, which is designed to make money for it long after
customers have paid for the phone itself.
It's an interesting strategy,
and somewhat of a gamble. Will buyers pay for content subscriptions once the
free year of service is up? Will entertainment content be able to offset the
costs of selling premium hardware at rock-bottom prices? Will LeEco manage to
put together a package that Indian smartphone users can't resist? We review the
new Le 1s Eco to find out.
Look and feel
If you've already seen or used the Le 1s (Review), there's absolutely nothing new to say about the Le
1s Eco. The two are identical for all intents and purposes. The newer model is
currently available only in gold, but there are no physical markings that would
help tell the two apart. Nothing has changed in terms of physical dimensions or
weight either. Our test unit even had the old LeTV logo on the rear, despite
the company having had enough time by now to update it.The only difference between the Le 1s and the Le 1s Eco is that the newer variant has a slightly slower CPU. It's still an octa-core MediaTek Helio X10, but the company says it runs at 1.85GHz rather than the 2.2GHz of its sibling. There's no word on whether the integrated PowerVR G6200 GPU is similarly reduced in speed.
Here's where the new Le 1s Eco differs most significantly from its sibling. The phone still runs Android 5.0.2 and we still think the custom EUI skin needs a lot of work - moving all quick settings to the app switcher screen and dumbing down the general capabilities of Android still feel to us like unnecessary changes. There's a neat feature that lets you set up tethering and connect to hotspots just by scanning a QR code, but on the other hand, the battery usage graph is missing from the Settings app. A core software update and some tricks borrowed from the rest of the industry would do LeEco very well, we believe.
That said, the Le 1s was top
notch in terms of its materials and build quality, and so we are not
disappointed in the least. The Le 1s Eco is just as slick and, like its
near-twin, feels a lot more expensive than it is. There's almost no space
wasted to the sides of the screen, and the top and bottom are narrow enough to
give this phone a relatively small footprint. It's a little sharp at the edges,
but is otherwise quite comfortable to hold and use.
Everything is within easy
reach, including the shiny fingerprint reader on the rear. The tray on the left
can hold one Nano-SIM and one Micro-SIM, but there's no support for microSD
storage expansion - not even a hybrid slot. The Le 1s Eco has a USB Type-C port
for charging and data transfers, and comes with the same interesting reversible
USB cable that we first saw with its sibling. You also get a quick charger,
which is larger and heavier than most common chargers, but it's worth the added
bulk.
Specifications
The screen is still 5.5
inches diagonally with a resolution of 1080x1920, and there's still 3GB of RAM
and 32GB of storage with no scope for expansion. The 3000mAh battery,
13-megapixel rear camera and 5-megpixel front camera are unchanged as well. You
still get a fingerprint sensor on the rear, and an Infrared emitter on the top
(though you can only use it with LeEco's own app, not popular third-party
ones).
There's also Wi-Fi ac,
Bluetooth 4.1 and A-GPS, along with LTE support on both SIMs. As stated, you
don't get microSD storage expansion, but there is an offer of 5TB of cloud
storage space for the duration of your Le Membership subscription. This is a
pretty good set of specifications for any phone, making the Le 1s Eco's price
all the more impressive.
All of this means that you're
getting basically the same phone, with just one minor concession, at a slightly
lower price. We'll have to see what effect the underclocking has on
performance, heat and battery life, but we don't expect it to have very much of
an impact.
Software
However, the meat of this
phone is its "LeEco Membership"
package, which gives users access to
movies, TV channels, songs, and live streams. You get to it by tapping the
circular "Live" icon in the centre of the dock on the bottom of the
homescreens. It's basically a customised implementation of YuppTV, and shows a
grid of TV channels sorted by language.
There aren't too many
channels to choose from, but quality is not bad with a high-speed Internet
connection.You get a fair number of news and music channels across 10 Indian
languages, but there's no sports, movies, general entertainment, cartoons, or
anything else yet.The app warns you if you're using cellular data rather than
Wi-Fi when you first open it, but not if it was already running in the
background.
It sometimes took a while to
get streams started, but they were stable enough when we used 4G or Wi-Fi with
a high-speed broadband connection. The highest quality option is 396kbps, and
the app shows data usage which averaged around 2100kbps at this setting.
Streams are 2 - 3 minutes behind live TV, which is of little consequence.
There's also another app
called LeVidi, which is basically nothing more than a YouTube client which
promotes a ton of Eros Now videos. The app seems to only show Indian videos
regardless of what you actually want to watch, and the search function does not
unearth most international YouTube results. Vlogger Lilly Singh aka
||Suparwoman|| shows up, presumably because of her Indian connection, but we
had no such luck with a number of other prominent YouTube creators and common
videos. Channel names are hidden from search results, on the main screen, and
even within the viewer. LeVidi might work for LeEco's content partners, but If
you just want to browse YouTube, we think the native app is infinitely better.
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