Letv began life about a decade ago as a streaming video service. Having successfully transitioned into the hardware space with smartphone and television offerings, the company is now beginning to dream much bigger. It recently entered the Indian market and unveiled plans to reinvent itself as a company that is involved in every aspect of the digital experience including software, hardware and content. This vision is already a reality in China, where LeEco as the company is now known, sells devices that are integrated with its streaming services and cloud platform. With the content deals still being hammered out, ‘LeFuture,’ will take a little longer to materialise in India. Meanwhile, the company hopes the launch of the Le 1s and Le Max ‘superphones,’ as the company dubs their devices, will lay the base for the ecosystem to come. Technophile got its hands on the lesser of the Le siblings, the 1s and put it through the gauntlet to find out if it is worth your money.

Design The 1s is a phone that really doesn’t look its price. The near complete lack of bezels and metal unibody construction give it the aura of a phone that is worth flashing. The top-notch quality of the build is evident even in the smallest details, such as the chamfered edges and the symmetrical speaker vents. The 5.5-inch Full HD display stretches from edge to edge, only leaving room for the usual speaker, sensor and camera combo above it and backlit capacitive navigation keys below. The display has excellent colour reproduction, which complements the colourful eUI interface well. It isn’t the brightest display panel around and gets hard to read under direct sunlight, but excels as a portable film screen.

The rear features a small fingerprint scanner in the center with the camera and flash units off to the top left. A small Letv logo and regulatory declarations are the only other visible marks on the surface. Although it doesn’t add any functional features with its design, the 1s pretty much perfects the rectangular slab form factor to deliver a very elegant package.

Performance Again, the 1s manages to provide better specs than its price would indicate. However, the specs race is something every manufacturer is engaged in and the Mediatek Helio X10 SoC in the LeEco device isn’t exactly going to blow the competition out of the water. However, it does manage to provide a very fluid user experience with its generous 3GB allocation of RAM. Multitasking was a breeze and there was no sign of lag or stuttering during regular app usage. Gaming performance is slightly weaker, with some of the more demanding titles on the Play Store clearly straining the PowerVR G6200 GPU’s capabilities. But every title we tried was playable at the very least and that’s good enough in this segment. The 32 GB of storage space is more than adequate to make up for the absence of a microSD card slot in most cases.

The fingerprint sensor on the Le 1s is quite fast. But it also does not take kindly to careless placement of digits, so it usually takes a couple of tries to get it exactly right, which means that the speed of recognition gets negated. Overall, it isn’t quite as frustrating as some of the other budget biometric devices we’ve seen, but it doesn’t exactly offer a seamless experience either.

Camera The rear camera on the 1s is a 13 MP unit that behaves rather like every other 13 MP unit in this category in every respect but one – it is very, very fast. Technophile had to visit a motorcycle test track during our time with the 1s and its razor sharp response time came in handy while trying to capture images of bikes whizzing by at top speed. Detailing and colour reproduction were adequate under well-lit conditions and suffered the standard drop in low light. The front camera is a 5 MP unit which is adequate for selfies and video calling.

Software The ecoUI skin on the 1s, which rides on top of an Android Lollipop core, is easily one of the most impressive custom interfaces we’ve used in the recent past. It incorporates a number of small, common sense options into the feature set that would otherwise require full apps such as in-call recording, data transmission speed display and multiple display modes. It also packs in an iOS-like control centre feature which combines multitasking and quick controls into a single screen. Support for custom permissions, themes and quick controls, all of which have become standard for custom UIs, are all present while bloatware is thankfully absent. Overall, the UI is clean and very responsive. A major feature of ecoUI, the integrated content services, will only arrive a few months down the line, but the current software stack is quite compelling as is.

Battery The 3000 mAh unit on the Le 1s is just about adequate at keeping the power packed device going for about a day. Technophile’s usage during the testing period is typically on the heavier side, so the average user could expect slightly better results. However, for those who sometimes forget to plug in at night or are constantly on the go, the 1s will require a battery pack to stay useful.

Bottomline The Le 1s is an impressive debut device from LeEco. While the Le Max, its bigger brother, has far better specs, the 1s is definitely the more attractive offering due to its extremely aggressive pricing. The combination of solid software and hardware that the 1s offers is nothing new in the budget space, but its excellent design automatically pushes it to the front of the queue.

The company also appears to appreciate the importance of after-sales support, having launched 550 service centres along with their new devices. However, the quality of this service network is still an unknown. For now, the Le 1s is only available via an upcoming flash sale on Flipkart, so potential buyers will have to jump through a few hoops to get it. But if that’s what it takes to put one of Le’s new superphones in your pocket, we believe it is well worth the minor inconvenience.

Price: ₹10,999

Love: Design, software

Hate: Flash sale model

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