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LeTV Le 1s- China’s Netflix Goes Overseas

China’s LeEco, otherwise known as LeTV, has set its sights on India. For a new entrant such as LeTV, making an impact in the Indian market is going to be a daunting task where there is already hyper competition from other Chinese companies, like Xiaomi and OnePlus.

However, LeTV is a rather unique company compared to Xiaomi, and is more like a Chinese version of Netflix: a company providing a service that also does its own devices. You can also think of them like Amazon, if Amazon were based in China and only had its Fire and Kindle Products and Amazon Video service.

The LeEco Le 1s is an Android 5.0 smartphone for sale exclusively on Flipkart, where we need to register prior to flash sale. I was able to buy the Le 1s in the second flash sale, and Flipkart delivered it on the next day. Let's see how the Le 1s was unpacked and set up after the Flipkart delivery.

The LeEco Le 1s box is similar to the packaging of many of the other smartphones coming into the India market from China.

One of the most impressive thing about LeEco Le 1s is its sleek, beautiful design. It flaunts an all metal body, with 5.5-inch full HD (1920*1080 pixels) IPS LCD display. The Le 1s is powered by a Mediatek 2.2GHz Octa-Core Helio X10 processor.

The phone's 32 GB of internal storage cannot be expanded, and is paired with 3 GB of RAM. The Le 1s also has a 3000mAh, non-removable battery. On the camera side, the Le 1s provides a 13-megapixel primary camera on the rear, and a 5-megapixel camera on the front.

The Le 1s is a dual SIM smartphone that accepts Micro-SIM and Nano-SIM Connectivity options. These include WI-FI, GPS, Bluetooth, and 4G (with support for Band 40 used by some LTE networks in India).

The LeEco Le 1s also has a mirror fingerprint sensor which can also be used as a camera shutter button. This sensor is in a similar location to the fingerprint sensors used in the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P.

LeEco Le 1s is also one of the first smartphones launched with a reversible USB Type-C connector. Interestingly, the supplied cable is also designed to be reversible at the Type-A end back to the power charger. No more fumbling around with the USB connector, trying to figure out which side is the right side up. Note the Le 1s doesn't use any of the other more sophisticated features of USB Type-C, and only supports USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s) data transfers.  The LeEco Le 1s does not support USB Power Delivery for fast charging- rather it only supports Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 technology.

When you turn on the Le 1s you can see that it's running Android.

As is normal with similar Android-based phones, you need to select your language, insert the SIM card (either micro-SIM or nano-SIM), and set up the WI-FI network. The Le 1s will try to scan for available WI-FI networks, and once it has been authenticated to a Wi-FI network it will get connected.

Once connected to the Internet, you will need to add your Google Account information.

After you have set up your Google account, you will need to set up your LeTV account.  With a LeTV account, you can sync dates for meetings and events from your calendar under LeCloud.

Finally, you can choose whether to opt out of providing user experience feedback, and select standard or zoom as your display view size.

Set up is then complete.

As LeEco/LeTV expands its online streaming services outside of China, it will continue to use its low cost devices like the Le 1s as a way to introduce its brand and services to consumers.  Like other Chinese brands, LeTV is expanding aggressively into India. It will be interesting to see LeTV's market penetration strategy in the US as well.