LeTV Le Max Pro First Look - the world's first Snapdragon 820 smartphone

CES may no longer be home to high profile smartphone announcements from the big names in Android, but what that does is give the lesser known OEMs a great opportunity to shine. Lesser known – or rather, unknown – is an apt description for LeTV but if nothing else, the company certainly has to be applauded for not holding back with their first smartphone offerings.

Along with the Le 1 Pro, which is a powerhouse in its own right, LeTV also took the wraps off an even more powerful sibling that comes with a series of industry firsts in tow. We go hands on, and give you our first impressions about the Letv Le Max Pro!

A metal unibody construction has quickly become the standard when it comes to premium devices, and that is exactly what you get with the Le Max Pro. Not only does this smartphone look great but it also feels nice in the hand and its slightly curved back allows for the phone to nestle comfortably in the palm of your hand.

Of course, the Le Max Pro is undeniably a large smartphone, with its 6.33-inch display, but LeTV has done a great job with keeping the bezels ultra thin and the portions above and below the display small, making for a more manageable handling experience. It may still fall well outside the realm of comfortable one-handed use but the device is certainly smaller than what one would expect from a phone with such a large display.

Speaking of the display, the Le Max Pro comes with a 6.33-inch IPS LCD display with a 2560 x 1440 resolution, resulting in a pixel density of 464 ppi. Quad HD is the right resolution for a screen of this size, and the display looks really good as well, offering good viewing angles and colors that look very nice. While its size may result in an unwieldy handling experience, media and gaming centric users will certainly appreciate the additional display real estate that is available to them.

Now to one of the many industry firsts that LeTV can boast about; the Le Max Pro is the first smartphone powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. This is clocked at 2.2 GHz and is backed by the Adreno 530 GPU and 4GB RAM. This is the processing package that is expected to power the majority of upcoming flagship smartphones this year and in the short time we got to spend with the device, it definitely seems to be up to the task. Everything was extremely smooth and snappy, and you don’t need benchmark test results to tell you that the Snapdragon 820 is the now the latest and greatest.

Continuing with the firsts, the Le Max Pro is the first smartphone to feature support for the WiFi 802.11ad standard, which – given its limitations – sees its application in very large file transfers, or high resolution media streaming. The Le Max Pro is also the first smartphone to feature Qualcomm’s Sense ID, which is an ultrasonic-based fingerprint scanner, that is expected to deliver better performance than the fingerprint sensors currently used in high end flagships.

In other hardware, 32 GB, 64 GB, or 128 GB are the storage options, but with no expandable storage, users may have to opt for the higher storage options to alleviate any concerns. The Le Max Pro is also one of the first few smartphones to adopt the latest USB Type-C standard. Powering the entire package is a 3,400mAh non-removable battery and the device also comes with fast charging capabilities to help you get up and running in no time.

On the camera front, the Le Max Pro comes with a 21 MP rear shooter with OIS, and a 2 MP “Ultrapixel” front-facing unit, that should help with getting good shots in low-light conditions. We can’t wait to put this camera through its paces, but we do like what we’ve seen so far. The camera app also comes with quite a few settings and modes baked in, including more granular control over aspects like exposure, white balance, and ISO.

Specifications

On the software side of things, the Le Max Pro is running LeTV’s EUI, based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The software experience is quite similar to what we’ve seen and come to expect from Chinese OEMs, with things like the absence of an application drawer found here. However, the big news with the Le Max Pro is the content included in LeTV’s software: instead of a traditional application drawer, there’s a shortcut to LeTV’s live streaming service, making live video content just a click away at any moment.

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There’s still no pricing or availability information quite yet, but we’ll let you know once we learn more. If this comes to market for the right price, could you see yourself with the world’s first Snapdragon 820 smartphone? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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