What sort of features can you expect from a device priced at Rs 10,999? Its answer these days would have been unimaginable one or two years back. One could blame it on the rapid fall in prices of technology or to the intense competition among smartphone makers but the fact is that today there are many affordable phones in the market with high-end specs.
The bar was raised a little further recently with the entry of LeEco, a China-based personal technology device maker, in the Indian market. LeEco, apart from Le Max and Le Max Sapphire, launched the Le 1s at Rs 10,999. Here is our first impression of Le 1s.
Design
The Le 1s despite its affordable price tag, comes with an all-metal unibody, along with mirror fingerprint sensor. As per the company, the Le 1s is one of the first devices to come with a screw-less unibody.
Indeed, the phone looks stunning in its metal body. Infact it looks much like the new gen iPhones. However, it feels a bit slippery and this could be a big issue in the summer season and especially for those with sweaty palms. I hope the company would make available some transparent back covers which would not hamper its looks but at the same time would give better grip.
Coming to the design, due to the metal body, the phone feels quite tough. The phone feels quite compact and can easily be operated by one hand by most Indian users. The mirror finished fingerprint sensor in the back apart from unlocking the smartphone, also helps in taking pictures.
The SIM tray is on the left-hand side while the volume rocker and the power button are placed on the right-hand side of the phone. The Le 1S has a microphone, for noise cancellation, on its back panel, besides the rear camera. The 3.5 mm jack and the Infrared port is at the top while two speaker grills and the USB Type C port are placed in the bottom panel. Another tiny speaker grill is positioned just above the display alongside a Proximity Sensor and the front camera.
There are three touch buttons below the display – Menu, Home, Back. All these touch keys are back-lit.
Display
The Le 1s has a 5.5 inch IPS display which has almost 180-degree viewing angle. The display brightness seems enough but I will have to test it in bright outdoors. The display felt quite smooth and responded to touch quite well. I especially fell in love with the colour output of the display and hope the display would behave like the same throughout the review which are currently doing.
User Interface
The Le 1s runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop operating system with the EUI 5.5 custom user interface on top of it.
The interface is a bit different from the default Android version. For instance, here while swiping from the top you will see the notifications but not the Quick Widgets like brightness controller, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS etc. Instead to access such widgets you have to touch the Menu key located below the display.
There is no App drawer either and everything is laid out on the home page itself. I will dig further into its UI during the course of our review and will tell you the pros and cons of its interface later.
Camera
The Le 1s has a 13-megapixel rear auto-focus camera with LED flash and a 5-megapixel front camera for selfies and video calling. I have already captured few shots using its cameras which you can check out here.
As far as my initial reaction is concerned, I think the cameras of Le 1s are quite fast. I managed to capture shots under one second. The cameras seem quite able to reproduce colours and offered a lot of details in the output. But again a lot needs to be explored about the cameras, especially their ability to capture images in low light.
Other Features
The LeEco Le 1s has Mediatek flagship Helio X10 Turbo 2.2GHz octa-core Processor and huge 3 GB RAM. Thus, I don’t think it will have any issues while playing high-end games. But, since I have not used the device extensively, I will talk about performance in our detailed review later.
The Le 1s has two SIM slots and offers 4G connectivity. It also offers USB Type-C port, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. The Le 1s has 32 GB of internal storage but doesn’t have any expandable storage slot which may go against it.