LeEco Le 2 Review

LeEco (formerly Letv) entered India early this year with Le 1S, the budget offering which was received well. The company announced the successor for this device back in April in China and was launched in India in June.

The Le 2  comes with 5.5 inches Full HD display and is powered by Snapdragon 652 Octa core processor with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage. It has Android 6.0 Marshmallow. So how does this device perform, let’s find out in this review.

Here is the video review.

Design and Build:

Le 2 is one of those devices in this segment which comes with great build quality. It features a full metal unibody design finished in rose golden color. There isn’t much of a change when it comes to design compared to the predecessor Le 1S. The rear panel has 16MP rear camera, LED flash, fingerprint scanner and Letv branding. The fingerprint scanner has a mirror like reflection. The front panel houses the 5.5 inches Full HD display, three capacitive touch buttons, 8MP front camera and sensors. The capacitive buttons are backlit.

There is a black finishing on both sides of the display giving a feeling that the device has an edge to edge display. There is also a metal band running around the sides and it has chamfered edges. While Le 2 is not the lightest of the devices, but definitely great to use and does provide with decent grip.

The right side houses the power and the volume keys and the SIM tray is positioned on the left side. The top houses the IR blaster while the bottom portion has USB C Type port and speaker grill. Overall, for a device priced Rs 11,999, it has good design and build.

Display:

Le 2 comes with a 5.5 inch Full HD display with 401 PPI. The display offers good colors and the texts look sharp and crisp. The viewing angles are also quite good and the sunlight legibility is also decent. The phone also comes with different display temperatures which included Vivid, Natural, and Soft which can be changed from display settings.

The touch response is very good, but there is no protection offered on the display unlike Le 1s which has Gorilla Glass on the display.

Software:

Le 2 has Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box and it has a custom ROM called EUI (5.8) similar to other Chinese OEMs. The EUI features multiple home screens and a notification center, but quick toggles are missing in the pull-down menu, instead they are weirdly placed in the multitasking option as a control panel.

The implementation is similar to iOS, but accessing it is quite different. EUI does not have any resemblance to stock Android and employs a custom skin everywhere.

While the skin is completely a mash up of iOS and Android, there aren’t too many features being offered when you compare it with feature rich MIUI or EMUI. The phone comes with just a hand full of themes and there are no options to download more. Most common features like one-handed mode, gestures are missing in the UI.

There are few pre-installed tools and apps and one of the useful ones is the Remote Control app which makes it easy to use the phone as a remote for your TV, A/C, and others. You also get 1 year of subscription to Eros and Hungama with the phone.

Performance:

Le 2 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 Octa-core chipset clocked at 1.8Ghz with Adreno 510 GPU and coupled with 3GB of RAM. The performance of the device was very good and we seldom noticed any lags in the day to day usage. The Snapdragon 652 is one of the most powerful mid-range processors available today. Opening apps and switching between them were effortless. The benchmark scores of Le 2 is more than 80k.

The gaming performance of the device was also very good with hardly any issues in gaming for a device in this price segment. We played graphic intensive games and Le 2 held up quite well and there wasn’t much heating issues as well as the temperature was around 42 degrees.

The call quality of the phone is quite good and we did not experience any call drops, the speaker performance is quite average and did not match up with the standard of Vibe K4 Note. The phone is the first smartphone to come with CDLA type C earphones as standard as it does not feature 3.5mm audio jack. The audio quality via CDLA type C earphone was very good and should be good for audiophiles. The phone also comes with 32GB of internal storage, but there is no expansion slot available. The storage available in the first boot is around 24.5GB and you have to live with this storage which should be good enough for most users.

The device sports a fingerprint scanner on the rear panel and you can add up to 5 fingerprints. The sensor can be used to unlock the device and also to take snaps with the camera. The fingerprint scanner worked very well and unlocked the device quickly without any issues.

Camera:

LeEco has improved the camera specs on Le 2 compared to Le 1S and it now comes with 16MP rear camera with f/2.0, dual LED flash and PDAF along with a front facing 8MP camera with F/2.2. The rear camera is capable of recording videos in 4K resolution which was also available in Le 1S.

The camera interface hasn’t changed much in Marshmallow version of EUI and it comes with all the bells and whistles including Slow motion, filters, Panorama, HDR, night mode, square shot. The PDAF was quite good on the device and taking photos was pretty quick with minimal lag. Now coming to the photo quality, this is one area where the Le 1s disappoints. While the auto mode did produce some decent results, they are not consistent in the quality. We have the same complaint as the Le 1s in terms of quality. While there is definitely some improvement it does not match up with what the competition offers in this segment. Here are some of the camera samples taken using the phone.

Battery Life:

The phone comes with a 3000mAh battery and the capacity is same as that offered on Le 1S. The device also supports quick charging 2.0.  We tested the battery performance with social apps, calls, browsing, gaming and a bit of camera usage along with calls. We ended up with almost a day of usage with the screen on time of around 3.5-4 hours. The battery performance on the device with Android 6.0 is quite decent and with QC 2.0 you don’t have to worry much about going down on battery.

Verdict:

Priced at Rs 11,999, the LeEco LE2 offers a good package especially with a powerful processor and great performance along with good finish and battery performance. But where the Le 2 loses out to the competition is the camera department. The camera on the Le 2 is quite underwhelming and does not match up with the competition.

If you are not too much worried about camera performance, the Le 2 is a good overall package.

Pros:

• Good build
• Great performance
• Decent battery Life
• Value for money

Cons:

• Poor camera
• No expandable storage
• No 3.5mm jack