LeEco LePro 3 unlocked phone review

[AthrunZ]

New to the forum, but I've been reading/watching LTT for a while, so I thought I'd finally throw something of my own on here.

There are plenty of professional reviews on the LeEco Le Pro3 from credible sources like ZDNet and digital trends, so I won't dive deep into anything crazy. Instead, I wanted to provide a real-life review of what I think of this phone, since some people may have either considered it, or been tempted to buy it.

 

Another "cheap" phone?

When it comes to phones, I've long been a Nexus fanboy; that is, they were usually the epitome of cheap affordable, high(ish) end hardware, and they made compromises you wouldn't notice much for the price. The Nexus 4, the Nexus 5, the Nexus 5X. These were all fantastic phones to me. The Pixel was a Bummer in my opinion, as it's none of those things, even though it's great.

 

So I was super excited to see another new company jump into the ring with a lower priced, higher spec'd phone - Le Eco (Which I guess is called LeTV in China... or so my co-worker tells me). I picked this bad boy up from LeEco's site for just $299 - and when it comes to a phone with 4k mAh battery, an 821 processor and 4GB of RAM, I couldn't resist. To be clear, I know there are other brands which are "low price good specs", but the temptation of something totally new is too much for me.

 

Overview:

If you need great battery life, want a fast phone, and don't care about the camera beyond showing colours that may or may not be blurry, this is the phone for you. Oh, and I hope you don't like headphone jacks.

Just do yourself a favour and install your favourite launcher immediately. "EUI" is horrible, and shouldn't be used by anyone. Ever.
 

Pros:

1. Battery Life
2. Battery Life (did I mention, battery life?)
3. Wickedly fast
4. cheap
5. Sharp display, despite "only" being 1080
6. Solid build, if a bit boring
7. Great fingerprint reader
8. Fully GSM compatible on all LTE bands (worked great with my AT&T service)

Cons:

1. The camera isn't great downright sucks
2. Memory management seems to have ADHD.
   Occasionally, it works fine, while other times I find myself with no "open" apps and only 1 of 4 GB of usable RAM.
3. The OS is a heavyweight - after just rebooting the phone, I MIGHT have just over 2/4 GB available.
4. The UI is terrible. I know you can skin the home screen, but even the settings menu is downright terrible - it isn't even searchable!
5. no CDMA for Verizon fans

 

 

The Battery is the only reason I would truly recommend this phone. And boy is it a good reason.

In the end, I am a ridiculously heavy user. My phone is always connected to my Pebble. My normal day starts getting up at 4:30AM and heading to the gym, where I use my phone to stream music on the car, and in the gym, syncing my fitness tracker, then streaming more on the way to work. At work, I stream music to my bluetooth headphones (because there's no headphone jack!), take meeting notes, write down to-dos, and reply to google hangout IMs from my co-workers. When I get home some time around 6 PM, I have about 40% battery, and play a video game like GTA or NFS for an hour or two without hesitation and have plenty of juice to spare.

 

That camera is horrible!

This phone has a 16 Megapixel shooter, which sounds pretty okay, right? Actually it downright sucks.

Lowlight and movement are essentially totally off limits, lensflare shows up in many photos I take with the sun even remotely out, and HDR mode is so slow I wouldn't even recommend trying it. Its painful. 

Let me be upfront about this - I am by no stretch of the imagination a photographer.

Personally, I thought the best camera I ever had in a phone was the iPhone 6S, which always took good photos no matter what I did, because I'm that kind of stupid picture user. Just let me press the button and have it come out usable for social media, or laughs. Preferably both.

Here's a few pictures I took as an example.

 

The multitasking change is actually, kind of nice.

I said above I hate the UI, and I stand by that. The inability to search the settings feels like I went back four years, and whatever launcher they included was just messy.

Not everything they did was bad, though. Generally I swayed to Android for my phones - but my last daily drive for a while was an iPhone 6S, because I picked one up with a broken screen, repaired it, and found a functional battery case to help get me through my heavy use days.

LeEco really messes with the UI - a swipe down from the top shows only notifications a'la iOS, and pressing that multi window button is kind of like merging the home double tap and swipe up. You can see it in the image below.

To close windows you swipe up (also, like iOS), but you have the ability to turn off and scroll through options like Wifi, Bluetooth, flashlight, camera, and other features like Android.

It's actually pretty well thought out. 

 

 

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 / 5) 

 

For me, the tradeoffs are worth it, but I would have shelled out just a bit more for a nicer camera. I'll probably end up flashing a new ROM on this eventually, too, since that menu screen is terrible, and memory management is atrocious.