Thursday 7 January 2016

Leagoo Elite 1 review

I bought the Leagoo Elite 1 Android phone from gearbest. I figured the low price (around £80) was worth the risk of either the phone not arriving, or being unusable.

The specs are impressive for the price:
  1. Dual Sim (or Single sim + micro SD card)
  2. 1.3 GHz quad core
  3. 3 GB ram
  4. 32 GB Internal Mem
  5. High res 5" IPS display
  6. Fingerprint reader.
  7. Looks like an iphone.
  8. 16 Mpix camera
  9. Android 5.1
There were some nice details in the packaging, it comes with:
  1. Card tray removal tool (like iphone)
  2. screen protector
  3. charging cable/charger
  4. USB OTG cable (not tried yet) for connecting external usb devices.
  5. earphones

First impressions:

The Good

  1. Standard Android.  Only minimal "crap ware"
  2. 100% English out of the box (other android devices I have bought from gearbest have been 90% Chinese)
  3. Fingerprint scanner is good.  Not as slick as that on the 6s, but close enough.
  4. General UI speed good.

The Bad

  1. Doesn't recognize the Samsung 64GB Evo micro SDXC card. 
  2. No user manual, no link to one.  Only a 2 page "quick start guide".  It should come either on the phone as a pdf or similar, or at least a QR code on the quick-start guide.
  3. Cant figure out how to use the "custom button" on the side of the phone. It would be great to use this to take pictures, but there doesn't seem to be any way to configure it.  You can set the long press action of this button to start a particular app, but that seems to be it.  What a waste of a potentially great feature.
  4. Camera  below iphone 5c quality, at least in indoor lighting.  This is to be expected - I have yet to find any phone which matches iphones for cameras.
  5. The tab switcher button is missing.  There is no way to see what tabs you have open in chrome. On Samsung phones, this is the button in the bottom left, and it brings up the apps and tabs as near full screen thumbnails to flick through.  On google phones it is the square icon at the bottom right.  There is no equivalent on this phone.  There are 3 "hardware" buttons at the bottom of the phone, the left brings up the menu (on some apps), the middle is the home button (and fingerprint reader), the right is a back button.  Sadly, there seems to be no way to get back the lovely tab view of running apps and open chrome tabs we know and love.  The nearest is to hold down the home button for several seconds, which brings up a small line of application icons (no thumbnails), which only have a few letters underneath (the first 10 letters of the website URL), so are fairly useless to find the tab you want.  This makes using chrome on this phone a frustrating and unproductive experience, if you are someone who uses a lot of tabs.
  6. No Giro.  you can't use it in cheap VR headsets.
  7. The home screens consist by default of 2 pages of application icons and a blank page.  Simple. but there are two more non editable pages - one to the left of the home pages with a large record player as some kind of full page music player which only shows the name of one track, and at the other end, some kind of full screen cut down camera app.  Both are firmly crapware, and useless for me. The problem is it is not possible to remove either of these two screens, and the really get in the way.
  8. There is no way to synchronize your outlook contacts on a PC with this phone.  Samsung comes with Kies at least.
  9. Frequent crashes and problems. Sometimes when booting, gives "UI Service has stopped". Other times, it wont unlock, it says: "Please, don't shelter RED ZONE (shows me upper zone of my phone with indicators and speaker) or press Volume+ and Back button"

Verdict

This is a good phone for the money, especially if you need dual SIM. The lack of any way to see your tabs in chrome, or get thumbnails of running apps, is a disappointment, as is the lack of support for the 64GB Samsung Evo micro SD card and lack of documentation.  Lack of giro shows where they have cut corners, but this will not affect most users.

Although it is great value, and not a bad Android phone, I wont be replacing my trusty battered iphone 5c with it as I had hoped.

It would have been a great phone with stock android.

About Gearbest.com

They are generally a good company - easy to order from. They let me cancel one order without issue, and returned the money.  Their technical support is poor - you are more or less on your own for after sales service.  Beware of their "user reviews" for products on their site.  They are blocking bad reviews. I left a poor but fair score and review of a tablet, with valid reasons and observations.  They never showed this, and my score was not added to the overall product review score. They only publish good reviews, so this is why all their products have such high user scores.   I guess censorship is part of the Chinese way.


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