LeEco’s latest flagship Le Pro 3 has not stopped making the headlines days after it was unveiled as the first smartphone by a Chinese manufacturer to feature the latest Snapdragon 821 chipset and second in the world only to the ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe. The admiration goes beyond just the power house, extending to the beautiful design and as an icing on the cake, LeEco LE Pro 3 with 6GB RAM and 64GB internal storage is being offered for just 1999 Yuan ($300).
The Le Pro 3 comes in two RAM sizes, one with 4GB RAM and another with 6GB RAM. Even though we eventually didn’t get to see a Le Pro 3 version with 8GB RAM as rumored, the specs line-up on offer here is enough to ensure that doesn’t even come to mind.
Design and Hardware- LeEco Le Pro 3 Review
Looks wise, the Le Pro 3 adopts the traditional LeEco design philosophy, coming with a thin 7.5mm body which accounts for 98% metal. The back features a premium brushed metal finish and the phone has to go through 36 complex processes along with CNC machining to get to the final product. The device features a unique design with less design bezels but there is a black border around the display edges. The phone measures just 7.5mm in thickness despite packing a 4070mAh battery under its hood.
Let’s pause a little an take a look at the accessories the phone comes with. The Le Pro 3 is packaged inside a black paper box having just the LeEco logo on top with nothing else written on top. Inside the box, there is the Le Pro 3 along with its charger, a data cable, a SIM card ejection pin and a USB Type C to 3.5mm audio jack adapter cable, just like Apple did. Recall the Le Pro 3 doesn’t come with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Display
The Le Pro 3 sports a 5.5-inch IPS LCD display with Full HD resolution (1080 pixels). There is also a 2.5D arc glass on top of the display. The black borders around the display screen isn’t too noticeable on a dark theme or wallpaper but on a bright screen it is very obvious and some might find it horrible but that doesn’t take away the shine from the device.
Right under the display, the home screen button is replaced with the LeEco “LE” logo acting as a virtual button. There are also two other virtual buttons lying by the sides of the virtual Home button.
On the back, the normal matte design is replaced by a all new brushed metal polish similar to the Xiaomi Redmi Pro. But this one feels more smooth because the metal body is further glazed to increase the smoothness and makes it feel less like you are handling a metal phone.
The edges around the back are curved a design that makes the Le Pro 3 feels comfortable to handle. The fingerprint sensor is mounted at the back, lying just under the rear camera which has a slight camera bump. The dual-tone LED flash lies just by the side of the rear camera. There are also two antenna bands running just above the camera in a horizontal plane and down below at the bottom edge of the phone’s back.
At the right side of the 7.5mm thick Le Pro 3 sits the volume rock as well as the power button. The antenna bands also pass through the sides.
On the other side (left) lies the SIM slot. The Le Pro 3 comes with dual-nano SIM cards so there is a SIM tray on which the two nano-SIM cards can fit into. That’s the essence of the SIM tray ejector included inside the box casing.
On the bottom edge, you get the USB Type-C interface and dual speaker grills which adds to the Le Pro 3’s beautiful look. LeEco yanked off the legendary 3.5mm headphobne jack from the Le Pro 3 but don’t worry you just don’t have to throw away ur 3.5mm heaphone as there is an adapter on the Le Pro 3’s casing which allows you still use your headphone with 3.5mm audio jack.
The top edge looks almost plane but for the mic and infrared sensor there.
Lastly on the hardware, there is a charger which supports outputs of 3.6V/3A, 8V / 3A, 12V / 2A, with a maximum power of 24W. Of course the phone comes with a 4070mAh battery with 24W Quick Charge 2.0 fast charging technology. The company revealed in the conference that the phone can charge up to 2000mAh in just 30 mins, which means almost 50% charge in just half an hour. Further, it said that the battery is extremely durable — 500 charges still retains 90% of capacity.
Operating System: Android 6.0-based EUI 5.8
The LeEco Le Pro 3 runs on the Android Marshmallow operating system with the latest upgrade of LeEco’s custom eUI 5.8 on top. The interface looks pretty beautiful and easy to navigate around. A number of custom apps are installed on the device.
Although the theme on the eUI 5.8 looks much like those on previous versions but you can always change the default theme if you like.
The EUI 5.8 brings such features as application lock, theme stores, calendars, stickers,schedule synchronization, custom ring-tones, mosaic painting etc.
There are so many new features that we cannot go over them one by one but suffice it to say the interface is cool and packs cooler features which makes the Le Pro 3 an interesting device to operate.
Processor Performance: LeEco Le Pro 3 with Snapdragon 821 + 6GB RAM
As mentioned earlier, the Le Pro 3 features the super fast Snapdragon 821 chipset, which was announced recently by Qualcomm. This will be a slightly faster version of the already powerful Snapdragon 820 chipset and the ASUS ZenFone Deluxe Special Edition is the only other phone in the market to feature this chipset. The chip will be clocked at up to 2.35GHz and the Adreno 530 GPU inside will clock at 653MHz.
When compared to the Snapdragon 820 chips, the Snapdragon 821 still maintains the same architecture but there are some improvements and a higher clock frequency. The performance of the SD 821 chips thus is about 10% higher than that of the SD 820.
The Snapdragon 821 chips also increases the start-up speed by up to 10% as well as application loading speed. SD 821 through Snapdragon VR SDK supports Android 7.0 Daydream virtual reality and dual phase detection auto focus, faster than the PDAF, and also offers expanded laser autofocus distance.
When subjected to the GeekBench app, the Le Pro 3 posted a total score of 160832 points. On the single-core test it polled a total of 1860 point and scores 4450 point on the multi-core test.
Let’s take a look at the impressive CPU setup and see how it fares against the competition. Unfortunately, iPhone 7’s A10 chip is yet to formally appear on AnTuTu but comparing the SD 821 with the iPhone 6S’ A9 chip, it trumps the Apple A9 chip.
On the 6GB RAM, only 4..7GB becomes available after start-up. Moderate daily use brings it down to around 3.5-4GB and when it is stretched a few more days with more than 30 apps installed, the remaining RAM size becomes around 2.9GB. So the 6GB RAM is mor ethan enough for the flagship device.
Camera Overview
These days, phone manufacturers are bringing in smartphone with high camera technology, sometimes even packing many SLR grade features. The Le Pro 3 sports a 16MP Sony IMX298 sensor at the rear. The fingerprint sensor can unlock the camera in just 0.1 seconds and the camera features PDAF, dual-tone LED. While the front-facing camera features an 8MP sensor.
When compared to its predecessor, the Le Pro 3 has seen great improvement on the camera end. Even shots taken at night come in with some decent level of clarity. Thanks to high-pixel resolution, picture details are preserved, and there are no obvious smear on the shots. Night noise is also properly controlled. Large aperture also brings good macro shots and adds bokeh effect to the background.
Also video filming comes out great on the Le Pro 3’s camera which is capable of HDR recording. The camera can quickly change from still shots to video filming even in HDR mode in less than one seconds. Here are some more shots taken by the Le Pro 3’s camera.
Battery Performance : 4070mAH Battery with Fast Charging
The Le Pro 3 comes with a massive 4070mAH battery with support for 24W (12V/2A) Fast charging which is currently the highest in the smartphone industry.
The charge rate is tested against the percentage of charge achieved right from 1% till full charge is achieved. It takes just 30 minutes to achieve 35% of charge and in one hour it has gotten to 70%, and 90% by one and half hour. The final phase seem to have slowed down because it spent an extra 45 minutes to get to full charge. It may be some sort of protection though but you can get enough emergency power within just few minutes of charging.
On the performance, alternating between watching videos, surfing the internet, using social media, playing music, stand-by operation, just 14% of battery usage was recorded in 2 hours. So its likely a fully charged battery can last up to 15 hours of rigorous use and if mildly use, perhaps you could be looking at two days’ use. Also during charging and testing, the battery didn’t heat up excessively, the back of the phone remained warm and the temperature did not exceed 40 degrees.
Price & Availability: LeEco Le Pro 3 Review
The Le Pro 3 flagship is found to be sport on, a true flagship on all side and you’d expect a huge price tag on it but quite surprisingly, LeEco adopts its low profit margin strategy on this one. The Le Pro 3 will start at just 1799 Yuan ($270) for the 4GB RAM + 32GB model. The 6GB RAM + 64GB model retails at 1999 Yuan ($300) which is amazing.
There are two other variants as well, and they are costlier because they come loaded with special contents such as LeEco video services and others. The two special models are called the ‘Zhang Yimou’ special editions, named after the popular Chinese film director and come with video content from the upcoming movie, Great Wall featuring Matt Damon. These special edition models are priced as follows: 4GB RAM + 64GB ROM will retail at $2499 Yuan ($375) while the 6GB RAM + 128GB model will retail at 2999 Yuan ($450).
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