Le 1S Review – Worth A Try

Of late, Indian market has become hunting ground of Chinese smartphones and every other day, we hear of debut of one or another smartphone from the land of China. LeEco, formerly Letv has the most dramatic debut in India. Before officially launching their two smartphones in India – Le Max and Le 1S, the company had bombarded the media with press releases on each aspect of the phone and these releases were coming from different accounts. Before the launch, the company organised many fan and bloggers meet to showcase their products. Surprisingly,the company had huge fan base despite the fact that their products were not available in India at that time.

Anyhow, in this article, we shall discuss about the Le 1S, which is gettting huge response in India and the company claims to have sold so far 70,000 units of this via flash sale. Does this success can be attributed to the pricing of this device, which has attractive tag of Rs. 10,999 or there is really any substance in the product? Let us find out.

Design and look

One of the outstanding highlight of Le 1s is its attractive look and feel. This phone is made of premium material and gives the feel of a flagship phone of any branded vendor. The company has used all metal for its design except two plastic strips on the top and bottom edges, which does not look odd to say the least.

The front of the phone is very refined and has mesmerizing look. The black glass surrounds the screen on both sides and to add more enhancement to the design, the metal band has been provided around the sides which have rounded edges.

The back of the phone is made of sand blasted metallic that sports a silver colored fingerprint scanner with a a mirror finish. The rear camera and flash is on the top left corner on the back of the phone. Letv branding, which is the former name, has been given behind the fingerprint scanner.

Power and volume rockers are on the top right side whereas Slim slot has been given on the left hand side. When you see the front, you will find the front camera with the sensor array. On the top edge is given 3.5mm audio socket and the Type-C USB port is provided on the bottom and you can’t charge your phone with standard charging cord but only with the cable provided by the company in the box.

Alongside the USB Type C port at the bottom edge, their are loudspeaker grilles on both sides. The grille on the right side is the actual loudspeaker and the other grille has been provided to keep the symmetry in the design.

The Le 1s weighs 169g and does not give the feel of a bulky device and you can easily manage with single hand.

Display

This phone sports a a 5.5-inch full HD display (1080×1920 pixels) and its viewing angles are decent. It reproduces natural colors and you will love watching movies on its screen. While browsing various sites, we found text quality quite good and graphics and images appear on the screen quite well. Like any other high-end device, this device also suffers from the problem of reading in direct sunlight otherwise the performance of the display is quite comendable.

Performance

This phone incorporates flagship like hardware features which are unheard of in a device of Rs. 11,000. It is driven by very powerful MediaTek Helio X10 processor with MT6795T chipset which has eight cores, clocked at 2.2GHz and  PowerVR G6200 GPU. It also boasts of 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage with no provision to extend it further. This phone offers connectivity options of 4G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v4.1, GPS, USB Type C etc.

With these hardware, one can expect very good performance from this device and Le 1S does not disappoint on this score. Opening and switching between the apps is breeze and we did not face any stutter or lag. Playing game even consisting of heavy graphics is a trreat on this phone. We played the games for quite sometime and did not face the problem of heating but if you play continuously say for one hour or so then the phone heats up a little bit and that is quite normal. Streaming of videos from Youtube was a smooth affair. This phone has good call quality and it catches nicely 4G signals wherever available. While listening to music, the phone’s speakers provided good sound quality and there was no jarring issue at all.

Fingerprint Scanner

This phone comes with silver mirror-finished fingerprint sensor at the back, which is actually a bit slippery. But that does not take its sheen away from its performance. It is very easy to set up and responds very quickly. You can set upto five fingers on this scanner. We have used this scanner for several times and never experienced any problem. It had responded in the time frame of 0.15 seconds as claimed by the company. Besides using it as for secutrity purpose, you can also click selfies and shoot with rear camera also with this when you are in the respective camera modes.

Camera

This phone comes with a 13MP rear camera with a single LED flash and has an ISOCELL sensor with f/2.0 aperture and Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF). On the front, their is a 5MP camera for selfies that has a Samsung S5K5E2 sensor and an 85-degree wide-angle lens.

With the rear camera, we clicked few images without any filter in normal light in close-up, which turned out the best. The camera struggle when their is no good light or fading light and the clicked shots do not come out bright and sharp. Their is an element of murkiness on the shots. Similarly in the night, the images were not upto the mark. Overall, our opinion is that you can use these images for sharing on social media only. It is very strange that on paper, this camera look quite convincing but its results do not match the claim. We shot few videos also with the primary camera and the quality is quite ok for this much priced phone. The selfie shots also come out good in good light.

Some of the images taken indoors and in daylight:

Shots taken in the evening and in night:

Battery

This phone gets its juice from 3000mAh battery, which can easily last upto 10 hours. We tested the battery by playing games for 30 minutes, repeated web browsing, calling for approximately one hour and watching few videos for 30 minutes. This battery did not fail us for approximately eight hours. The slicing on the case is that you can charge the battery quickly with its fast charge feature. It has a bulky charger but it charges the empty battery in few minutes and you will definitely love this aspect in the phone.

Software

The Le 1s runs Android Lollipop 5.0.2 with proprietary EUI 5.5 user interface on top. We have never been appreciative of top up interface of any Chinese company as it bring lot of complication and some times  duplicity in apps also. But in the case of The EUI, it is a simple user interface and we did not notice any blaotwares. Some useful apps come pre-loaded on this phone which has been given under one icon of the company and consist of YouTube, TOI, Twitter, Yahoo, ESPN, Facebook, Snapdeal etc. Similarly, the company has given an app for music also for music lovers. Overall, naviagtion of apps and running the app is a good experience on this phone.

To Sum up

Le IS phone has all the features one want in a budget phone. If you are spending Rs. 11,000 then you can’t expect more from the company. This phone has good metal design, reasonable camera, processsor works fine and you get good working fingerprint scanner and 3GB of RAM. It has Dual-SIM support. On the downside, the internal storage is not extendable but 32GB memory is quite suffiecient for normal usage, and the camera quality is not upto the mark.

If you are in the market for a budget phone and do not care much about new brand then you can certainly give this phone a try and chances are you will not rue your decicsion.