Are you planning to buy the Le 2 in the coming flash sale on July 12th? Do you feel Le 2 is the best budget-end smartphone out there? Read our LeEco Le 2 review to see if your conception about the Le 2 is right or not?
Before getting into the LeEco Le 2 Review, let us see, on what basis the users are buying the smartphone now? Well, to be honest, most of the brands have found the budget-end smartphones works better than the flagships. This has been proved many times and the Le 2 is not an exception in the list. Most of the users now are interested in a premium smartphone with a fingerprint sensor, good storage capacity & a decent performance, and the main aspect is price & the smartphone they are considering as premium should be within the budget they are planning for.
Now, most of the brands have focused primarily on this budget-end segment & most of the smartphone they are releasing usually meets these requirements, I’ve already told that Le 2 is not an exception in the list as it met all the requirements (which we have explained during the launch), but the main thing here is how well the device performs. To know this let us find out in the LeEco Le 2 review in detail.
LeEco Le 2 Review – In Detail :
As like every other gadget review, I will maintain a flow, that is starting from the very basic concept & flow towards the main point. So, stick to your seats and read the review before you hit the buy button in the upcoming flash sale.
Design & Build Quality –
Design:
There’s a saying, ‘First impression is the best impression, and it can also be the last impression’, I hope you got the line, if something attracts you at the first sight, it will become the best impression, otherwise it will stay in a negative way. I should definitely say this line – as I am talking about the design & build quality of the Le 2. From Le 1S to Le Max 2, LeEco showed what a uni-body metal smartphone will look like! Though the phone is the rose gold variant, you can find the contrasting color on the edges & sides which amplifies the look & feel of the phone. It doesn’t weigh as much as the other phones, but it is not as slim as it seems. But, comparing to the predecessor, Le 2 is slightly thin and have more details in its design.
On the front side of the phone, you can see the front-facing camera aligning with phone’s earpiece & ambient light sensor. I should say this looks exactly like the Baymax (famous anime character from the movie – Big Hero 6). You can’t unsee the smartphone now I guess. Well, on the bottom side of the front side, you can find capacitive touch keys which are backlit (not like in the ZenFone Max). On the rear side, you can find the phone’s antenna bands, the primary camera with dual flash & the fingerprint sensor (mirror-based design). As usual, the Letv logo is inscribed few centimeters from the fingerprint sensor. Near to the end of the rear side, you can find few other inscriptions (like in the iPhone) and yeah, ‘Made in China’. On the right side of the Le 2, you can find the volume rocker and the power key. In between these metal keys you can find a depression to indicate the separation, so you can’t do any misoperation while locking the screen and reducing/ increasing the volume. On the other side, you can find the sim tray where you can place two nano SIMs. Sorry folks, no external memory card support.
Just like the normal phones, we suppose to find a 3.5mm audio jack, but in Le 2 you won’t find it. Instead, you will find an infrared sensor on the top of the phone. So, what happened to the audio jack? Well, you might have heard of USB Type – C right? Le 2 is one of the first smartphones to ditch the audio jack & make use of Type C port for audio. Also, the company featured their own CDLA technology & have also released the very first USB – Type C earphones.
As already mentioned about the Type- C port, you can find at the bottom which is placed in between the speaker grill. Now, let’s see how the build-quality is!
Build Quality:
As already mentioned the phone is a uni-body & you will feel premium whenever you touch it, and special thanks to the metal finish for giving the premium looks to Le 2. But, on the front side, if you look closely you can find a little metal bump over the screen. Though it is given to protect the edge-to-edge display, sometimes you feel like you are using a case which you don’t like. I’ve not dropped the phone even once, as I felt it will definitely break the display (as experienced in Le 1S). While on-hands I feel both the back & the front display are prone to dust & fingerprints, so a casing must be used to prevent this & as usual, a matte cover to protect the display.
Display
Le 2 has a 5.5′ inch IPS LCD display with 401 PPi and has an impressive 74.4% screen-to-body ratio. The best feature I liked in the Le 2’s display is its adaptive brightness. Well, my current primary phone is Asus ZenFone Max [2016] and I already explained the troubles I faced because of its inadaptive to the environment lighting. In the case of Le 2, it simply adapts to the natural lighting, and the display will be clearly visible even in the sunlight. Though there’s some glare, but the display gets adjusted in few milliseconds.
As you might be knowing that Le 2 comes with free content like you can watch the live TV and the other feature – ‘LeView’ is a curated view of recommended videos from YouTube, so the phone is all about visual (video) content and the only thing that matters to a user is a better display, so to enjoy watching it. To be honest, Le 2 won’t disappoint you in terms of display or even in terms of recommending you the right content (LeView). I enjoyed watching HD videos and the color saturation is too good. Also, there’s one more app called LEvidi which also curates the best videos from certain categories based on your interests.
Camera
So, the camera segment is basically about just showcasing few of the camera samples right? well, it’s not! Anyhow, let’s take the LeEco Le 2 review a little further and see what it holds beneath!On the specs sheet, LeEco Le 2 sports a 16MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture and a dual-LED flash, while the front-facing camera is of 8MP. The specs seem to be really high-end, but what about the performance in real time? Well, the Le 2 does perform well. Before
On the specs sheet, LeEco Le 2 sports a 16MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture and a dual-LED flash, while the front-facing camera is of 8MP. The specs seem to be really high-end, but what about the performance in real time? Well, the Le 2 does perform well. Before explaining it, take a look at few of the pictures I captured.
Yeah, they are all captured in Bangalore Streets & you might be knowing the weather conditions in Bangalore. Most of the time you won’t be seeing the Sun & obviously the natural lighting will be very low. Even in this low-light conditions, the pictures captured from Le 2 are simply brilliant. You won’t find any noise or any shades on the captured snaps. The color reproduction using the HDR mode is way out of my expectation. Overall, I really liked the HDR mode as it dramatically improved the snapshot which I captured & filled the picture with real-life like colors. But, in the normal mode, I feel the shots taken are just average. I used to manually select the focus just to make sure that the focus part fills with light and I feel you know what I mean! (autofocus is not that great). Though the camera has the basic modes + filters, I kinda feel like they are enough to test your photography skills.
Performance
Now, the real testing phase in my LeEco Le 2 review – the performance segment. Before going in, let me give a brief about the specifications of Le 2 in terms of performance.
The LeEco Le 2 is powered by a 1.8GHz octa-core processor embedded on Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chipset. For GPU, the phone is packed with Adreno 510 and runs on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) based on EUi. For a budget-end phone, the specs seem to be very high-end on the specs sheet, let’s also check out how the phone performs while using it daily.
As the phone is completely a visual content oriented phone, so it usually takes up a lot of RAM. Though the 3GB RAM is packed inside, I felt the device lags sometimes but not very often. The EUi is artistic when it comes to both performance & visual wise. The phone is completely optimized to provide the basic shortcuts with a single touch. As already mentioned in my Le 1S review, the phone’s UI resembles iPhone UI & I felt like using an iPhone running on Android OS ( I know it sounds crazy, but it is what I felt). Even the transparent notification bar from the top swipe is pretty similar to that of iPhone notifications. Keeping the iPhone stuff apart, let us have a look at the benchmarking.
Benchmarking Results
- LeEco Le 2 AnTuTu Benchmarking Results
- LeEco Le 2 Geekbench Results
Just from the benchmarking results, you can see that no other budget-end smartphone has got a good score than the Le 2 & they are not even near to the phone’s score. This shows how well, the device performs. To explain more, let us move to the gaming.
Gaming
I installed the Asphalt 8 and played it quite long, and haven’t faced any lag on the device. But, one thing I noticed is, the device heats up on excessive playing & I faced the similar issue while watching the videos long for more than an hour (on WiFi). while gaming, there was no lag even on multitasking . The only situation I faced lag on the device is while watching videos (for quite some time) and try to switch another app. Besides that, I felt very comfortable accessing all the features of the phone at ease.
Fingerprint recognition:
This may not be the first device to incorporate this feature, as there are many other new smartphones which have already got this feature. Though the time to recognize the fingerprint is actually low (in milliseconds), but the way it recognizes is not accurate. I have to place my finger twice or thrice to get it detected. While configuring the fingerprint I have placed my index finger in all different ways (possible ways), but the detection is inaccurate. I feel this is a major drawback in the phone.
Battery Life
The phone comes with a 3.000mAh non-removable Li-ion battery which is, of course, gonna power the entire phone. As already mentioned that phone comes with a lot of free content & to watch it you should definitely need a big battery & LeEco gave a decent range of 3000mAh. While on usage (always on Wi-Fi), watching videos & gaming , the phone has lived up to 12 hours (max) and on moderate usage, it goes over a day.
The best part of the phone is it comes with USB Type- C port & supports Quick Charge 2.0. It can get charged 50% in just 30 minutes and can reach 100% in 90 minutes (approx). The charger also has dynamic voltage scaling which regulates the voltage systematically. So, you don’t have to worry about the device getting heated during charging, because it won’t, but there are chances if you enable quick charge 2.0.
Value for Money
Under Rs. 12,000 you’ll get a high-end specification smartphone with the very first USB Type- C earphones and I don’t see any reason why the Le 2 is not considered as a value for money phone. It’s definitely worth buying. Still, if you are confused I would recommend you go through the LeEco Le 2 review again :p
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Edge-to-Edge display
- body to screen ratio
- USB Type- C port
- HDR Mode is brilliant
- Good performance
- Battery life
- Free content from LeEco
Cons:
- Lags & heats up (not very often)
- Fingerprint recognition is not accurate
- Poor camera
- No 3.5mm audio jack
Verdict:
If you are planning to buy a smartphone under Rs. 15,000 and looking for choices, I would recommend you just with the Le 2 without thinking of any other smartphone or else you will regret later.
