These new phones don’t bother with a headphone jack, but they’re not made by Apple

By Andy Boxall Published April 20, 2016

If you’ve never heard of LeEco, you may know the company as Letv, which made a big splash earlier this year with the Letv Max Pro, the first phone with a Snapdragon 820 processor. Following a name change to LeEco (that’s for ‘ecosystem,’ rather than eco-friendly) it has now launched three new phones — the Le 2, Le 2 Pro (pictured above), and Le Max 2, all of which are missing an until now, very common feature: the headphone jack.

A “feature” rumored for inclusion on the next Apple iPhone, the removal of the headphone jack presents a problem. Where do you plug in your headphones? LeEco solves the self-made problem by bundling earbuds or over-ear headphones that operate through the USB Type-C connector. Apparently, the headphones support LeEco’s Continual Digital Lossless Audio system, but the benefits are unknown for now.

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How about the rest of the specs? Let’s look at the Le 2 and Le 2 Pro. Both have a big 5.5-inch touchscreen with a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, 32GB of internal storage space, and an 8-megapixel selfie camera. The differences come in power and with the rear camera, which is 16-megapixels on the Le 2 and 21 megapixels on the Le 2 Pro. MediaTek provides the processor. The deca-core Helio X20 is inside the Le 2, while the revised X25 is powering the Le 2 Pro. The latter is currently only found inside the Meizu Pro 6.

The Le Max 2 is likely to be the successor to the Le Max Pro we saw at the beginning of 2016, has a 5.7-inch 2560 x 1440 pixel screen, and is powered by the Snapdragon 820 processor, with a gigantic 6GB of RAM. LeEco does enjoy giving its phone plenty of power. A 21-megapixel Sony camera is on the back, which is the same setup as the Le 2 Pro, and there’s 64GB of storage space. All three phones have a fingerprint sensor on the rear of the device, under the camera lens. LeEco still intends to launch at least one phone in the U.S. later this year, and there’s an excellent chance it’ll be the Le Max 2.

Prices vary from around $230 for the Le 2, $325 for the basic Le 2 Pro, and $390 for the Le Max 2. Pre-orders apparently begin today in China, but no local or international release dates have been discussed.

Former Senior Mobile Writer

Andy has written about mobile technology for almost a decade. From 2G to 5G and smartphone to smartwatch, Andy knows tech.

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