Letv Le One Pro – What you get in the box

Letv Le One Pro Review: Great phone for a great price

If you are in the market for an Android flagship but you are on a budget then we have the best solution for you. It is the Letv Le One Pro, which we had the opportunity to test out and here is our in full review which you can also watch in video. Spoiler alert: It is a great phone.

Letv Le One Pro – What you get in the box

Let’s start thing with what you will receive in the box of the Letv Le One Pro. Apart from the phone itselft, you get a SIM ejection tool, a USB Type-C to USB cable for charging and syncing, the wall adapert which can uotput power at 2Amps and finally, a USB Type-C to micro USB adapter, which will probably come n handy since the Letv Le One Pro is one of the first phones to come with a USB Type-C port as standard. Everything is packaged nicely and the whole unboxing experience gives off a premium feeling.

Letv Le One Pro – Build quality

The Letv Le One Pro is one of the best devices I’ve held in my hands for a while and the build quality is perfect. The whole device is metallic, and the only plastic we find is the antenna bands is the back. A huge plus is also the fact that Letv tried to create a phone with very small bezels and that adds to the overall beauty of the phone. There are some capacitive buttons on the bottom bezels though, which I would have preferred inside the screen to be honest.

Looking around the device, we find the USB Type-C port at the bottom along with the speaker and microphone. The two grills give the impression that there is a dual speaker, but only the right side is actually producing sound. On the right side we find the power button and SIM tray and on the left there is a volume rocker and a dedicated mute slider. On top there is a 3,5mm headphone jack and an IR blaster for using the Letv Le One Pro as a remote control. Lastly, the back of the phone houses the 13MP main camera and the dual tone LED flash.

Letv Le One Pro – Display

Now let’s move back to the front of the device and talk about the display. The Le One Pro has a 5,5″ IPS panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels and if I were to describe the screen using only a word, I’d say it is stunning. Viewing angles are great and color reproduction is very accurate. Everything looks so crisp in this display. One thing I really appreciated is that there is a color management option in the settings with some pre-customised profiles. If you are like me and want everything to look as accurate as possible then you set that at the Natural setting and everything looks great.

Performance & Software

And we arrive at a crucial aspect of this phone, the performance. And I say it is crucial because of the phone’s CPU. The Letv Le One Pro is rocking the infamous Snapdragon 810 CPU which has caused quite a debate this past year, about its performance and overheating issues. In this case I think that Letv has done a great job and the performance has been great, without any noticeable drops of power under heavy load, and without any overheating issues. Everything seems to be running great. Along with the Snapdragon 810 we find the Adreno 430 GPU, 4GB of DDR4 RAM and 32GB of on-board storage which is unfortunately non expandable.

The software tasked with driving all this awesome hardware is of course Android, and in the case of the Letv Le One Pro it is based on Lollipop 5.0 and it is heavily skinned with Letv’s own creation called EUI. The EUI  is heavily influenced by iOSwith elements like the Quick Toggles, Recent Applications and Settings closely resembling Apple’s creation. At least there are no lags and the phone offers a very smooth experience. If you want to bring back a somewhat stock look then you can always choose a 3rd party launcher from the Play Store.

As of right now Letv has not provided any info regarding the update of the Le One Pro to Marshmallow, but I hope they will not alienate so many people by abandoning such a great phone so early. Let’s not forget that the Le One line is Letv’s first smartphone generation so I can’t see how abandoning their first phones will make people interested in their later endeavors in the smartphone market, and that makes somewhat hopeful for a Marshmallow update in the near future.

Letv Le One Pro – Camera

The camera is another area where the Letv Le One Pro shines. The main sensor is the 13MP Sony IMX214, and the results it produces are great. In good lighting conditions it snaps photos instantly, and it focuses extremely quickly. Even in low light situations it produces very good images but there is some noise if you are not using the flash. But you should definitely use the dual tone flash since it helps immensely in producing very good shots in low light. In the video department the Letv Le One Pro is capable of recording footage in 4K resolution at 30fps.

The front camera, may only be 4MP in resolution but it utilises the UltraPixel technology that we first saw in the HTC One M7, with the pixel size being bigger than in most sensors out there, which helps very much in low light, since the front camera does not come with a flash. The UI of the camera app as you might have expected is pretty much what the iOS camera app looks like. That though did not bother me at all since I appreciate the simplicity in this case.

Battery life

The Letv Le One is equipped with a 3000mAh battery. While that may not be completely encouraging considering the fact that the phone has a QHD display and the Snapdragon 810 System on Chip, the battery life is pretty good. It is among the best compared to other QHD smartphones, and while it may not compete for the title of the best smartphone battery, it is still a very good performer in that department. In a full day of combined usage, you can expect a screen on time of around 4 hours. Furthermore, the Letv Le One Pro offers great stand by time. During the night it loses between 2 to 4% of charge, which in my opinion is very good.

Sound & Call Quality

As I’ve already mentioned the device’s only speaker is located at the bottom. While not being the loudest and the clearest out there, it is not bad either. I would characterize it as decent. On the other hand the call quality from the microphones and earpiece is great. During my calls the other participants would hear me loud and clear, and the same was true from my end.

Conclusions

In conclusion I’d say that the Letv Le One Pro is one of the best Snapdragon 810 devices out there, and one of the best Android flagships overall, and that is without even factoring in the price. If you consider that this phone can be yours for less than $300 then it becomes a no-brainer for someone that looks for a flagship device but is on a budget. Letv certainly impressed me with their first effort in making smartphones and I really look forward to their next creations!

You can find my Greek review over at TechValue.gr