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Business News/ Tech-news / News/  Is LeEco 1s Eco worth buying for its premium content?
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Is LeEco 1s Eco worth buying for its premium content?

The bundled content offering is add-on to users who want to buy the Le 1s Eco. Even if you are planning on buying it for the content its not a bad deal

With LeEco Live, users can watch over 100 TV channels live on their smartphone for free. Premium
With LeEco Live, users can watch over 100 TV channels live on their smartphone for free.

Chinese smartphone-maker LeEco has tied up with several Indian content providers such as Yupp TV for one year’s free access to live TV channels, with Eros Now for free access to movies and with Hungama for free music. Users also get 5TB of personal cloud storage free. However, to access all this content, users will have to buy LeEco Le1s Eco ( 9,999). This new phone is a variant of LeEco Le1s ( 10,999) and has the same configuration except for the processor which has been under-clocked from 2.2GHz to 1.8GHz, but is cheaper.

Offering free access to paid subscription-based content with smartphones has been used by a number of phone makers as a differentiator in a market where most phones have more or less the same hardware. Samsung has tied up in the past with Magzter and BigFlix to offer free access to several leading Indian magazines and free movies respectively.

LeEco claims a user can save up to 4,900 of subscription money by buying this smartphone. We take a look at some of the premium content which are available right away and whether they are enough to get a user to buy the new phone.

Free movies

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In addition to it, users can also watch all the TV episodes from some of the leading Hindi TV channels such as Sony and Colors TV, along with curated video clips from Star Sports, T series, India TV and Rajshri movies. The content under Eros Now is interesting if you like Bollywood movies. But barring it, the rest of the content is already available for free on Youtube or the official apps of the content providers.

Live TV channels

Live TV on mobile is another popular service in India. With LeEco Live, users can watch over 100 TV channels live on their smartphone for free. One of the advantages of having Yupp TV on board is its wide array of regional channels. Besides English, it includes Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Oriya, and Telugu channels. These channels have been rearranged based on their language. User can also pin their frequently visited channels as favourites for instant access.

Outside of the bundled model, Yupp TV charges 99 per month and 30 per week for its premium subscription. However, some of the premium international channels such as BBC News, Al Jazeera, History Tv 18, CNN which are otherwise available on YuppTV are not there on LeEco’s live TV channels list. Which means it is not offering all the premium channels.

One other limitation of Yupp TV is that it doesn’t have any of the leading sports channels such as Ten Sports and Neo Sports.

The tie-up is interesting, but most of the promised content is yet to show up. Also, there are some inconsistencies between the channels you are getting on LeEco’s version of Yupp Tv and the paid app of Yupp TV.

Key highlights of the smartphone

LeEco Le1s Eco smartphone has a 5.5-inch HD display with 1920x1080p resolution. It runs on 1.8 GHz MediaTek octa-core Helio X10 chip with 3GB RAM and 3,000mAh battery. It offers 32GB of storage but doesn’t have an expandable memory card slot. It comes with dual SIM slots and supports 4G networks on both of them. It runs Android 5.0.1 (Lollipop) with LeEco’s proprietary custom UI over it. The phone offers a 13-megapixel rear camera and 5-megapixel front camera.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abhijit Ahaskar
Abhijit writes on tech policy, gaming, security, AI, robotics, electronics and startups. He has been in the media industry for over 12 years.
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Published: 27 May 2016, 04:16 PM IST
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