The Le 2 is a powerful smartphone at a budget price
After the success of the Le 1s, LeEco has launched a new budget smartphone dubbed as the Le 2. The smartphone is priced at Rs 11,999 and can be purchased via Flipkart. Even though it’s just a successor to the LeEco 1s, it offers some impressive upgradations. Let’s check out if the phone is worth buying in the budget segment.
Build and Design
The LeEco Le 2 is made up of a full metal unibody, and features an elegant design with a smooth and shiny body. Also, there are two stripes covering the corner of the edges, giving it a unique look. The shape and body of the smartphone is good and easy for regular use. But I feel that the back is a bit slippery and uncomfortable to use sometimes.
The front panel has camera and sensor at the top of the display, the capacitive backlit buttons are below the screen. The bezels are very thin, black in colour and covered with the screen from all sides.
The rear panel has LeTv’s logo (even though the company has recently rebranded to LeEco) at the middle along with camera and flash at the top. The fingerprint sensor is below the camera and above the logo. The volume rocker and power keys are at the right edge, while the micro-USB port and speakers are at the bottom edge. The rear panel doesn’t pop out, but the SIM card tray is at the right edge and accepts two nano SIM.
Display
The Le 2 offers a 5.5-inch Full HD In-Cell display with 1,920 x 1,080 pixel resolution and 403 ppi. I’m really impressed with the display quality, the colour reproduction is excellent, the icons, as well as the system gesture, seems pretty good to our eye. The brightness of the device is good and can easily be seen under sunlight and in different viewing angles.
Hardware and Software
The LeEco Le 2 is powered by the 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 clocked at 1.8GHz with 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM. Apart from these, it comes with 32GB of inbuilt memory out of which users get around 25GB of free space to use, sadly the storage can’t be expanded. The specs are very powerful for its price range.
The performance of smartphone is excellent and one can use several apps in multitasking. The RAM can be cleared with one click. Talking about the gaming performance, it runs all the high-end games perfectly with no lag. I ran Asphalt 8, Injustice and Dead Trigger 2 simultaneously and the device was able to multitask with ease. Although there is a slight heating issue while playing the game for a long time.
The benchmark performance of the smartphone in AnTuTu and Quadrant Standard is really impressive, it scores 81,636 and 42,365. The video and sound quality of the smartphone are also very good which makes it a good entertainment smartphone.
The Le 2 comes with Android Lollipop 6.0.1 with EUI 5.8 on the top of it. The UI difference some gestures, unlike the original one which is innovative and good. The UI provide a lot of customization power to users. There is very less bloatware in the smartphone, some of the company’s apps like entertainment and yahoo. The UI is quite impressive and minimal.
Camera
The rear panel sports a 16-megpixel camera with Dual-tone LED flash and features like f/2.0 aperture, PDAF and CMOS sensor. The camera captures great photos and rich in colours, details, and smoothness. Images taken in daylight is vibrant and sharp. The low light performance of the smartphone is also good, the flash works fine although there is minimal distortion.
The front camera is of 8-meagpixel and has f/2.2 aperture and 76.5-degree wide lens. It also captures great selfies with it. The taken images have a good amount of detail and a bit of enhanced face tone. The images look as similar we see through our eyes.
The given app by the company is good and simple to use. There are many customization modes for the users as well as the app is fast and smooth to capture images.
Battery and Connectivity
The Le 2 is packed with a 3,000mAh battery and gives the user a full day backup with single full charge. With my moderate use, it lasts for 14 hours or so and for a minimal user, it could last up to 20 hours.
It is a Dual-SIM smartphone with 4G and voLTE connectivity where both the slots accepts nano SIM cards. But the user can run one SIM at a time, other will be at standby mode. The calling facility was good and I didn’t face any call drop while using it.
Gizmo Verdict
At a price tag of Rs 11,999, it is packed with good and powerful components. However, it faces tough competition from the devices such as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, which promises better battery life. Overall, it’s a great smartphone, but not the only choice in the segment.
