LeEco Le 2 Smartphone : Full Review

LeEco, formerly known as Letv, is a Chinese technology company & largest online video companies in China. Not so long ago, LeEco came to India and rose up so quickly that it became a brand in the country. With the launch of top-notch smartphones in India back-to-back, the company is also entering the Indian TV market by launching their SuperTVs in India on August 04, 2016, more on that later. LeEco tasted massive success with the launch of LeEco Le 1S Eco smartphone which was priced at Rs.9,999 in India and came with superb metal design & performance. LeEco Le 2 is the successor of Le 1S Eco which came with an improved design, hardware and specifications, In this article we are going to Review the new LeEco Le 2 Smartphone in depth, covering all the sections and areas. So let's get started.

LeEco Le 2 Smartphone Review

Unboxing

LeEco Le 2 is priced at Rs.11,999 in India and is available at Flipkart. It comes in a beautifully designed compact box which contains the Le 2 itself on the top. A transparent silicon type back cover is also provided inside the box. Other than that you'll get a Fast Charging Adapter, USB Type-C cable, A USB Type-C to 3.5 mm converter, some manuals including warranty card, SIM ejector tool for ejecting SIM tray and that's pretty much it. LeEco does not provide earphones with Le 2, you'll need to purchase them separately. Let's move on to the Build Quality & Design.

Display

LeEco Le 2 packs a 5.5" Inch Full HD IPS Display with the resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and pixel density of ~401 ppi. There is no confirmation regarding the use of Corning Gorilla Glass, so we'll suggest using a screen protector just in case it doesn't. I am really impressed with the displays sunlight legibility, you can easily see in sunlight. The display looks amazing and is bright enough for your daily needs, technically speaking Le 2 display can produce brightness up to 500 nits, which is quite impressive for a phone in this price segment. The viewing angles of the display are quite good and contrast levels are again great. Overall Le 2's display is good for indoor and outdoor use.

Build Quality & Design

LeEco Le 2 is no doubt one of the best-looking smartphones at present. As soon as I opened the box and held the device, I was impressed at how light it felt in the hand and how beautiful it looked. The device in crafted in metal unibody and weighs 153 grams, It is 7.5 mm in thickness which is quite slim for a device like this. Full dimensions of Le 2 are 151.1 x 74.2 x 7.5 mm. The power key and volume rockers are placed on the right side of the device, the top contains the IR blaster, the bottom contains the microphone, speaker grill, and USB Type-C port. Dual Nano-SIM tray is on the left side and fingerprint sensor is on the back. One thing to note is that Le 2 does not have a 3.5 mm jack. There is a small LED light next to the earpiece for notifications. The variant I had for testing is a Rose Gold variant of Le 2 which looks quite good but if you don't like this variant you can go for Gold, Silver or Grey variant.

Audio Playback

Jumping to Audio, the first thing which I would like to talk about (and I'm sure you want to know more about this) is the missing 3.5 mm jack. Yes, it's true, Le 2 does not come with a standard 3.5 mm audio jack, the only port available on Le 2 is the Type-C USB port, and yes, the same port is used for audio connectivity, which according to me is a bold move but also an unnecessary one. Elimination of 3.5 mm jack is, however, going to happen sometime in future but right now its kinda standard all around the world, no matter what device you use, you can connect any headphones / earphones with it using the standard 3.5 mm jack, this includes cheap headphones & expensive ones, by completely eliminating the 3.5 mm jack, LeEco is forcing people to buy USB Type-C headphones. People who already have expensive headphone / earphones will either have to use a Type C to 3.5 mm converter or buy new headphones.

You must be thinking that if USB Type-C Audio port is future, then does it mean the audio quality on Type C is superior to 3.5 mm input? Well, Yes it is superior to 3.5 mm input and I'm going to explain briefly why it is. A normal smartphone has something called DAC or Digital to Analog Converter which is used for converting audio from bits to bytes. This converts digital audio signals to analog signals and plays through your earphones. By using USB Type-C, the idea is to eliminate the use of DAC in smartphones. USB Type-C talks to the phone digitally and straightaway receives digital signals and plays through your earphones, since there is no conversion required, there is no loss of signal, thus it is known as Lossless Audio. This does improve the audio quality technically but still requires you to purchase CDLA or Type-C earphones separately. It's good to see that LeEco is providing a USB Type-C to 3.5 mm converter right inside the box, using this you can use any 3.5 mm headphones / earphones with your Le 2.

The microphone grill and speaker grill are at the bottom with USB Type-C port, the speakers are loud enough for enjoying music with friends & family. It's good to see that Le 2 comes with Dolby Atmos technology which does improve your music experience.

Continual Digital Lossless Audio (CDLA)

LeEco heavily promoted CDLA audio technology which simply stands for Continual Digital Lossless Audio, as I explained in the above paragraphs that since USB Type-C talks digitally to the phone & receives digital audio signals directly and plays through the earphone (unlike 3.5 mm jack which requires a DAC or Digital to Analog converter in order to convert digital signals into analog to play through earphones). Since there is no conversion when Type C port is used, there is no loss of signals, thus the signals received by the earphones are Lossless, whereas when 3.5 mm jack is used, digital signals are converted to analog in order to play through the earphones, which causes loss of signal.

CDLA ensures that you receive lossless audio which technically does improve your music experience. I will be doing a separate review of LeEco CDLA Earphones so do check that. I've used the CDLA earphones along with this device and I can say that they do work well and audio produced through them is crystal clear. You can enable / disable audio enhancement under settings panel of your phone.

Hardware & Performance

LeEco Le 2 comes in two variants with different hardware under the hood. The first variant pack Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 SOC with 3GB RAM and Adreno 510 GPU. This variant is an Octa-Core variant; Quad-Core 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 & Quad-Core 1.8GHz Cortex-A72. The internal storage provided on board is 32GB, which cannot be expanded. 

The second variant pack MediaTek MT6797 Helio X20 chipset along with 3GB RAM and Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. This variant packs a Deca-Core processor which is a 10-Core processor; Dual-core 2.3 GHz Cortex-A72 & quad-core 2 GHz Cortex-A53 & quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53. The internal storage provided in this variant is again 32GB with no microSD support.

The variant I had for review was Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 variant and I was quite happy with it. The performance delivered was simply above my expectations. In Normal mode, the phone keeps six out of eight cores on and two Cortex-A53 cores on sleep. In High-Performance mode, all eight cores jump in to deliver extreme performance. I've tested Le 2 with many high-end games like Asphalt 8: Airborne, Modern Combat 5, N.O.V.A 3 etc. and it played them well without any problems. The memory management of Le 2 is also better than other phones in this segment. There were no heating issues as well, except for some warming up with continuous gameplay for longer durations. Overall I was really impressed with the performance of LeEco Le 2, Benchmark results are given below.

Benchmarks

Here is the complete Benchmark report of LeEco Le 2. We ran a series of popular benchmarks like AnTuTu, GeekBench, 3D Mark Unlimited, GFXBench Manhattan 3.0 and Quadrant Standard. Below are the scores.

As you can see from the above image, LeEco Le 2 scored 81035 in AnTuTu v6.1.4 benchmark, Quadrant benchmark score is 33360 and finally Geekbench 3 score is 1557 (Single core) & 4935 (Multi-Core)

Software

LeEco Le 2 runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out-of-the-box, topped with eUI version 5.6, which is a custom ROM from LeEco. In a conversation with LeEco on Twitter, I asked them what does eUI stand for? and their reply was that it stands for Ecosystem UI, it does confuse many with Emotion UI of Huawei but it's good to know that it stands for Ecosystem UI and not Emotion UI. 

The eUI is a fresh new interface and bit confusing too, it takes some time to get used to. First of all, there is no app drawer, on the home screen in place of app drawer button, there is a button captioned LIVE, tapping on this button takes us to a new window where you can watch television channels like news channels, entertainment channels, English channels, Hindi channels and other regional channels. The notification center can be accessed by swiping from the status bar down, it only contains notifications, there are no Quick toggle/shortcut buttons here, they have been moved to app switcher, I didn't like this new move, I'm used to swiping notifications center for quick settings. There are some pre-installed apps which are unnecessary (bloatware) but other than that eUI looks beautiful and is very smooth in operation.

Camera

LeEco Le 2 boasts a 16 Megapixel camera with OV16880 image sensor by Omnivision. The camera supports Phase Detection Autofocus, f/2.0 aperture, Dual-LED flash (dual toned), face detection, HDR, Panorama etc. It can record videos up to 4K (16:9) ie. 2160p@30fps, 1080p@30fps and 720p@120fps. The secondary camera is 8 Megapixel camera with f/2.2 aperture and 1.4 µm pixel size. The front camera can record videos up to 1080p Full HD. Check Video Camera Sample here.

LeEco Le 2 camera surely sounds good on paper but I was really disappointed with its performance. The camera performance of Le 2 was below my expectations, especially during low light photography. The noise level was really high which ruined the photos, there weren't many details. The performance improved a bit in daylight but still was not up to the mark. The interface is quite clean and smooth, the fingerprint sensor can be used as shutter key for both the cameras. Phase detection autofocus is pretty fast and accurate but the lack of stabilization results in blurry images. Below are some sample shots clicked using LeEco Le 2 camera, do look at them.

Connectivity & Battery

LeEco Le 2 is a Dual Nano-SIM smartphone supporting 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE Bands. Both the slots are Nano SIM slots and not hybrid slots, which means both slots only support SIM cards, unlike hybrid slots which also support microSD card. Other connectivity options include Bluetooth v4.1, A2DP, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (dual-band), WiFi Direct, hotspot, GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS and BDS, USB Type-C Reversible connector. There is no 3.5 mm audio jack on Le 2.

Le 2 packs 3000 mAh Li-Ion battery which is non-removable and fast charging. Le 2 is not among the best in terms of battery performance, on average it lasts for about 9 hours with moderate usage and 30 minutes of gaming. One thing I like about this phone is Quick Charge 2.0 which really helps in charging the phone fast.

Quick Charge 2.0

LeEco Le 2 supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 technology, which can charge Le 2 up to 50% in 30 minutes. In order to take advantage of Quick charging, you'll need a Quick Charge 2.0 supported charging adapter. Luckily LeEco provides one inside the box and it works quite well. I've tested Quick Charge 2.0 several times and it does charge the phone relatively fast. The device charged for 9 percent to 91 percent in about 45 minutes, that is 82 percent; I was quite impressed with this. Full charging for 1% to 100% took 68 minutes which again quite fast. We recommend only using the adapter which came in the box for best results.

Verdict

After testing the device for more than a month, I can surely say that this is one of the best smartphones in 12K INR price segment in India. Comparing it with Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, I can say that Le 2 gives tough competition to it and also proves better in some areas. The CDLA Audio is amazing, coupled with Dolby Atmos Audio it is awesome. The camera, however, lacks at some places and takes long to focus but still shoots decent photos, It struggles in low light conditions but overall it is good for the price. The OS is beautifully designed and quite smooth, the performance is great and it does not heat that much. The gaming performance was quite good and overall the phone is really good for the price tag of Rs.11,999. According to me the biggest competitor of Le 2 will be Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 which is priced similarly. Other phones with similar price tags are Moto G4, Lenovo Z1 Zuk, Asus Zenfone Max (2016) and Honor 5C.

LeEco Le 2 is priced at Rs.11,999 in India and is available at Flipkart.

So overall the phone is amazing, we do recommend LeEco Le 2 for those who are looking for a fresh, beautifully designed Android smartphone at mid-budget.

Also Read: Panasonic Eluga Note Launched in India for Rs.13,290

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About Jimmie Luthra

Jimmie Luthra is a Mariner, Tech enthusiast, Blogger and Gadget reviewer. He is fond of technology and is usually found playing with some piece of tech. He is also a Guitarist, Music lover & fitness freak.