LeEco Le 1s

The use of metal as a construction material is one of the best ways to indicate the premiumness of a smartphone. While this formula has been used on flagships for quite a while, thanks to Chinese manufacturers, we’re increasingly seeing metallic phones at budget price points. The LeEco Le 1s is no different, as it features a gorgeous metal unibody.

For a phablet, a 5.5-inch display has somewhat become a standard and that’s what you’ll find on the LeEco Le 1s. With a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, the IPS display panel offers crisp text and you won’t have any complaints with its colour reproduction either. A layer of 3rd-gen Corning Gorilla Glass helps keep minor scratches at bay. The screen is legible under direct sunlight, so no issues there.

Since Google's services aren't available in China, all the homegrown brands offer a modified version of Android and the Le 1s is no different. The phone runs the brand’s custom skin called eui (eco user interface) which is layered on top of Android 5.1 Lollipop. The company has promised an update to the latest Android Marshmallow soon.

The LeEco Le 1s features a 13-megapixel ISOCELL sensor at the back, which is sourced from Samsung. For fast autofocussing, it comes with phase detection autofocus technology and also features an LED flash to illuminate the object in low-light settings. For selfie addicts, the handset offers a 5MP camera at the front, which has a wide aperture of f/2.0.

Not too long ago, MediaTek was known for its affordable chipsets and hence it was a dominant choice in budget offerings. However, the Taiwanese chipmaker has now started moving up the value chain by offering high-end SoCs under the Helio branding. The LeEco Le 1s comes powered by its top-of-the-line processor christened Helio X10 and thus is the most affordable phone in the Indian market with this silicon. The X10 is made up of eight Cortex-A57 cores running at 2.2GHz. The CPU also offers the PowerVR G6200 graphics engine for taking care of the visuals. The processor has impressed with its chops in quite a few devices such as the MEIZU MX5 (review), and our experience remains the same with the Le 1s. Multitasking doesn’t pose any problems for the handset either, thanks to 3 gigs of RAM. There was nary an instance where the phablet struggled in opening apps, switching between various tasks or even playing games.

Running the show on the LeEco Le 1s is a 3,000mAh Li-Po battery. While it fared poorly in our standard test by playing back an HD video for slightly more than six hours, with the brightness and volume set at 50 percent and radios turned off, in real-life usage, the capacity is enough to ensure that the phablet lasts an entire day of use. That remained the case even when we pushed its usage with battery-draining features like navigation and gaming.