From being relatively unknown in India only a few months ago, LeEco has managed to become popular and give tough competition to established brands such as Xiaomi and Gionee.
With the Le 2, the company has made a fairly sleek design, very similar to the LeEco Le 1S, and weighs 153 grams . The power button and volume controls are placed on the right, while the left side features a small panel that houses the nano-SIM slots. If you were brought up on staid music and random logos of phones starting up, the LeEco Le 2 boot screen starts with a message, “I am not a phone but an integrated Internet ecosystem”, a hat tip to the video and streaming services the company claims to offer for free, which in itself, makes you keen on knowing more about what the phone offers.
The Le 2 is equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 652 processor, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of non-expandable storage, which is fairly impressive for a phone in this price range. It also supports a range of 4G bands. It boasts of a 5.5-inch screen and offers a resolution of 1920 x 1080. The colour scheme works well, and we did not face any issues with the brightness, though the auto brightness setting did not quite live up to its name.
The device allows you to take pictures with a 16 megapixel rear camera and an eight megapixel front camera. It also allows you to record 4K resolution videos. The camera is fairly decent for normal clicks and selfies and offers a range of filters and colour options that look good. It is perhaps one of the better cameras in the sub-Rs.12,000 range.
The Full HD display is crisp and offers great viewing angles. As far as performance goes, the phone does not hang when multitasking or working on multiple apps, though a help prompt often pops up, asking you to report any issue you face while using the device.
Though the phone runs on Android Marshmallow, we were not very impressed by the EUI, which does not have a menu option upfront and switches back occasionally to the original UI, even if you are using a Google Now or Nova launcher.
The 3000 mAh-powered battery ensures that even with fairly heavy usage, including viewing videos and listening to music files, the charge lasts for a day and a little more, the only drawback on this score being a tendency of the device to heat up, when it is being charged.
The fingerprint sensor, placed at the back, just below the camera, has a slight lag and we felt it would have served its purpose better if it was placed in the front. With a host of entertainment options available on LeLive and a clutch of inbuilt apps, it is a good buy if you want to catch TV on the go and have a high-speed data plan or WiFi connection.
One of the major changes in the device is the use of CDLA technology for enhancing sound quality and the 3.5-mm audio jack being junked; the phone came bundled with a pair of USB-C headphones.
We found that the sound quality was fine, but nothing spectacular to warrant a new pair of headphones. Even from the design standpoint, we felt that there was no need to junk the audio jack. As a phone, The LeEco Le 2 scores high on design, boasts good battery life and ensures that you can work on multiple apps without lag and remains a great phone for clicking good pictures and videos, especially in this price range.
