The Le Max2 is the flagship of LeEco. Although it is still the Max series, the more "conventional" 5.7 inch screen and the starting price of 2099 make the Le Max2 more suitable for volume than the previous generation. But times are changing. In recent months, Xiaomi Z2 Pro、 One plus three Z11， Almost all the "big powers" in China have launched the Snapdragon 820 model with high cost performance. Can LeEco live up to the slogan of "born alone"?
Appearance and packaging
The package of Le Max2 has a skin like coating, which feels good. Accessories include instruction manual, card taking pin, charger, double head Type-C cable, Type-C to headphone interface.
The most special point in the packaging of Le Max series is that the machines are packaged together with protective sleeves. The previous generation of Le Max used a hard shell, while the Le Max2 was replaced by a silicone cover.
There are several small regrets in the package of Le Max. The first regret is that the silicone sleeve does not wrap the camera. After it is put on, the camera will still directly rub the desktop
The charger adopts USB-PD standard and supports 5V 3A or 9V 2.7A output specifications. The charging head uses a dual USB Type-C cable. The last machine that encountered such a charging head was the Nexus 5X and 6P.
The second regret is that the Le Max2 is not equipped with a common USB to Type-C data cable. If you want to connect the computer, you have to purchase an additional common Type-C cable
The third regret is that both Le Max2 and Le 2 have canceled the 3.5mm headphone interface, and the earphone has to be equipped with an additional adapter. This is not a convenient setting for audio enthusiasts or not.
Le Max2 and Le 2 introduced the new digital audio lossless standard CDLA for the first time. With Type-C digital headphones, they can complete the pure digital lossless audio architecture, but now it is more "symbolic", because traditional earphones can not be plugged into the CDLA, while digital earphones need to be purchased additionally, and the official configuration is not free
The front is the iconic ID without a border, and the focus of the design is clearly the simplicity and integrity of the screen. On the top is the earpiece, as well as the symmetrically designed light/distance sensor and front camera, and on the bottom are the three hidden Android diamond keys.
The back design of LeEco is also very recognizable. The Le Max2's camera is prominent and exaggerated. On the right side of the camera is a dual color temperature flash lamp, and on the bottom is a new logo with hot silver.
The antenna partition strip crosses the body up and down, but it is not a common injection molding process. The fingers can clearly feel its existence. In addition, the upper and lower parts of the fuselage are plastic patches with slight color difference with the fuselage metal, but the height difference is well controlled.
The screen sizes of Le Max, Le Max2 and Le 2 are 6.33, 5.7 and 5.5 inches respectively.
On the right side of the previous generation are wireless module slot, sim card slot and power key, while this generation has changed to volume and power key. Strangely, the lower priced Le 2 has a polishing groove at the power key.
The left side of Le Max has mute and volume keys, while this generation has only sim card slot.
The top of Le Max2 and Le 2 are infrared emitters, and both sides of the frame are chamfered and polished. The previous generation also had a headphone connector on the top.
The biggest slot on the appearance of Le Max2 must be this "towering" camera. Its height can even put down a whole volume button, and its area is huge.
The bottom layout is all speakers, Type-C connectors and microphones, but this generation has two more antenna separation strips.
The Le Max2 screen size is 5.7 inches. The pressure of a single hand grip is not very great for men, but it must be more supportive for women. In addition, in the interface with more white color, the effect of ID without border is a bit inconsistent, but compared with the border on both sides, the top and bottom borders are more annoying.
In terms of actual border width, Le Max in the lower left corner is almost the same as Le 2 in the upper right corner. Their actual width is close to that of Huawei P9, but the latter is half of the side arc and half of the black edge, so the visual effect is much better.
Compared with narrow frame models such as Xiaomi 5, the black edge width of LeEco family is more impressive. In terms of workmanship, the machine is relatively solid, and the joints between plastic and metal, the touch of keys and the virtual position of sim card slot are well controlled, but the workmanship is not able to open the gap with Le 2 at the thousand yuan level.
Hand feel and fingerprint recognition
feel: The weight of the fuselage has dropped from the previous generation's 200g level to the normal 185g level. With the rounded corners, the grip is still good. But the 5.7 inch fuselage is not expected to be single handed. In addition, because the thickness of the frame is normal, the number of false touch of the machine is much less than that of the machine with super narrow frame such as Note5.
Fingerprint identification: The ultrasonic fingerprint identification used by Le Max2, but the fingerprint identification sensitivity of the testing machine is very low: normal pressure does not respond, and the fingerprint wake-up speed under the rest screen is also very slow. The whole process takes 2 or 3 seconds, and it is often unrecognizable. It is very annoying to use it. It is recommended to close it for daily use.
However, the online news said that the ultrasonic fingerprint identification needed an additional service, which was killed by the system's own alignment wake-up. Turning off the "Alignment Wakeup" function in the "Housekeeper" will improve the experience to a certain extent.
screen
Le Max2 adopts 5.7-inch 2560 * 1440 resolution IPS screen, with nominal maximum brightness of 450 nits and 95% NTSC color gamut. The measured contrast is 1417:1, and the color gamut reaches 99.8% sRGB color gamut.
510 and 494 nits on the left and right sides of the top, 450 nits on the center, and 487 and 478 nits on the left and right sides of the bottom. The brightness of the whole screen is higher than the nominal 450 nits. It is not a big problem to use it in daylight, but the backlight uniformity is in line, with the maximum value exceeding 60 nits.
Under the brightness of about 100 nits closer to the daily use, and the default "LeEco" display mode of the system: the measured color temperature is 7841K, which is slightly cold, in line with the common visual habits of Asians. The average deltaE of 104 colors is 4.3, and the maximum deltaE is 6.3, which is average. For comparison, Note 5 is 1.8, S6 edge+is 2.6, and S7 edge is 2.9.
system
Like Le 2, Le Max2 is equipped with EUI 5.6 based on Android 6.0. The evaluation of this system can directly follow the conclusion of the previous Le 2 evaluation: when this system first came out a year ago, it was quite amazing, and this may be the first version of the most complete system in history. However, more than a year later, the improvement of EUI in function and ease of use is relatively limited. Without the halo of the new system, EUI is just the mainstream level of domestic ROMs.
desktop
Pull up the control bar and notification bar
LeEco live
System application
Some of its system logic is quite distinctive:
LeTV video information stream is on the left side of the system desktop, similar to the news aggregation page on the left side of HTC and Samsung desktops;
In the center of the dock bar below is LeEco's own enhanced video portal. The live broadcast will be played in the form of a thumbnail by default, which is intuitive and shocking. However, it has high requirements for performance and network speed. It can easily eat the 2M/s network speed and feel the heat of the fuselage in a few minutes;
The pull-up control bar is integrated with the multitask management interface. There are shortcut switches and shortcut application bars. Both support user-defined sorting. The multitask card supports the background protection of pull-down locking;
The setting page has few logical levels, and almost all of them are directly displayed in the first level menu, resulting in a full list of three pages, but it is relatively intuitive. In the setting, the built-in application setting items are also paginated, which is worth learning from other domestic ROMs.
The system steward has few functions, but there are still self starting and flow control, and there is a switch for aligning wake-up.
This system runs on the hardware of Le Max2, and its use experience is also very similar to that of Le 2. The default animation of the system is relatively slow, the operation is not very easy, and the response speed of application startup is average. It is also recommended to close the animation in the developer's option. The return key of Le Max2 is too close to the inside, which is the same as that of Le 2. At the beginning, it is often missed, and it takes time to get used to it.
There are still some advertising problems, mainly message push, and the number is large. The most puzzling thing for the author is that Le Max2 will occasionally get stuck on the desktop, which is rarely encountered on Le Max2. To sum up, the use of the Le Max system is not very smooth. I hope the system update can be improved in the future.
performance
The Le Max2 has four different configurations: 4+32, 4+64, 6+64, and 6+128. The price is 2099/2299/2499/2799 respectively, but all of them are Qualcomm Snapdragon 820+LPDDR4 memory+UFS2.0 flash memory. Snapdragon 820 uses a four core Kryo core, 2 * 2.15GHz+2 * 1.593GHz large and small core architecture. GPU is the strongest Adreno mobile phone platform in service 530@624MHz 。
The room temperature is 28 degrees. Use @ ioncannon's GPUGFLOPS to check the physique. The Le Max2 in this evaluation is tragic. The big core physique is the lowest level. Normal models are expected to be strong in our test machine. The GPU's physique is above average. Fortunately, physique mainly affects the continuous explosive power and endurance, and has little impact on the absolute performance.
The floating point operation performance of the four core full open copy machine is about 120GFLOPS, between the eight core full open Exynos 7420 and Kirin 950:
It can maintain full frequency for 30 seconds (low);
Then it was set at 1.55G for large nucleus and 1.3G for small nucleus, and maintained until 95 seconds (also low);
After that, the large nucleus 1.2G+small nucleus 0.8G, which lasted until 120 seconds, began to fluctuate significantly, and occasionally returned to the highest frequency for a short time (corresponding to the late jump of GFLOPS).
The Snapdragon 820 of Le Max2 is relatively passive. Its thermal stability is definitely better than that of Snapdragon 810, but it is still far from the abnormal frequency stability of Kirin 950. Although it is generally negative, when the fever is serious, it will actively try to return to the highest frequency, and the setting is very special.
Actual score
CPU computing performance
GPU graphics performance
Flash memory read/write performance
Compared with the One Plus 3, Xiaomi 5 and S7 edge, which are also known as Snapdragon 820, Le Max2's passive regulation makes its CPU performance slightly better than the famous passive 820 version of S7 edge, and GPU performance even worse than that of Xiaomi 5 and Xiaomi 3, which try their best not to reduce the frequency.
On the premise that the larger the capacity is, the better the storage speed is, the one plus three and the Le Max2 are both 64G, and the other two are 32G, but the Le Max2 is still the strongest, only slightly weaker than the one plus three in random reading speed. This part of the score run has a great impact on the application startup speed and daily smoothness. The excellent flash memory reading speed of Le Max2 should not have obvious system jam, so we should find EUI to back up this issue.
photograph
The camera of Le Max2 and its predecessor are all 21 megapixel Sony IMX230 sensors with f/2.0 aperture, which support phase focusing and optical anti shake.
app： The LeEco photo interface is easy to use. Sliding above the shutter can call out common photo modes such as HDR, night view and beauty. The button on the lower right corner is a filter. The camera parameters can be adjusted in the floating window, and "sharpness, contrast and saturation" can be customized.
Experience: The overall photo taking experience of Le Max2 is standard in the flagship machine, better than Le 2. The success rate and speed of focusing in low light are much higher, but there is still no HDR, night view mode and automatic trigger function.
Focusing: The phase focusing speed is good, but the focusing success rate is low. Even in the sunlight scene, there will be occasional out of focus, and the pre focusing sensitivity is also general.
Speed: The shutter response and film forming speed are fast, while HDR and night scene processing speed are average.
Film forming rate: the yield in automatic mode is good, the film forming rate in HDR mode is also high, but the film pasting rate in night scene mode is high
Metering: the metering of Le Max2 is slightly darker than that seen by the naked eye, and the metering under weak light is very close to that seen by the naked eye
White balance and saturation: it is relatively stable and accurate, slightly cold, and the color is light and elegant, taking the true restoring wind.
Tolerance: the tolerance of the whole film is low, the backlight scene is easy to appear black death, and the contrast performance is normal.
Contrast: the quality of the machine's lens is average. When the side backlight or facing the light source, the contrast of the picture will decrease, as if covered with gray.
Noise and detail processing: There is slight sharpening and smearing, but you can still see the slight noise in large areas of solid color such as the sky, but it retains more details. But the noise in the dark is obvious.
Lens quality: poor performance. There will be serious radioactive spots and ghosts when facing the light source. There will also be fogging phenomenon that affects the contrast when facing the side backlight.
Discrimination: The daytime discrimination benefits from 21 million high pixels, which is excellent, and should be close to or even exceed the G5 at the top of the current discrimination. Optical anti shake support is provided in the light and weak light scenes. The machine can maintain a relatively low ISO and can retain a lot of details. Even if it is not the strongest, as long as it is not ultra weak light, it will not be a problem to rank first among domestic mobile phones.
Left: automatic mode Right: HDR mode
HDR algorithm: the exposure will be significantly improved, and the dark details will be displayed. When turned on, the overall white balance will turn slightly green, and if it is not a scene with large light difference, it will lead to overexposure. However, the loss of discrimination is small, and HDR availability is high overall.
Left: automatic mode Right: night view mode
Nightscape mode: After being opened, it is basically to open and smear. Only in the face of pure text will there be positive improvement, otherwise there will be serious discrimination and picture details. It is recommended to keep it closed for daily use.
In general, Le Max2's photographic performance is mixed with joy and sorrow, and its analytical power and white balance are excellent, but the photographic experience HDR、 The performance of the night scene mode is general.
Endurance&Heating&Charging
The Le Max2 is equipped with 3100mAh batteries. After 30 minutes of large-scale games (NBA 2K15), 30 minutes of wifi and 4G Internet access, 1 hour of music playing and 30 minutes of local video playing, the remaining power is 70% after a full three hour endurance test.
Among all the Snapdragon 820 models, it ranks at the lower middle level, weaker than S7 edge, Xiaomi 5, G5 and other machines, but slightly better than one plus three. The power consumption of the online part is very low, but the power consumption of games and videos is high. It is estimated that this is mainly the price of the 2K resolution IPS screen.
The frequency control of the machine is relatively strict. Although the performance cannot be fully utilized, the power consumption control benefits from this: after 30 minutes of NBA 2K15, the highest temperature in the front appears in the chin, 42.2 degrees, and the highest temperature in the back appears in the left side of the camera, 40.7 degrees, which shows excellent performance.
Le Max2 charges from 5% to 100%, 55% in half an hour, 80% in 45 minutes, and 93% in one hour. The charging speed began to slow down after 90% of the power. It took 1 hour and 11 minutes to fully charge, and the performance was excellent. Of course, it would be better if there were no compatibility problems caused by Type-C interface charging head and dual end Type-C charging cable.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the machine has high requirements for data lines. The Xiaomi 4C data line on the author's hands cannot read data normally, but the robust data line of Le 2 is OK.
summary
One of the slogans of LeEco Max2 is "I am not just a mobile phone, but a complete mobile Internet ecosystem". Compared with the system, LeEco's video resources are the most important competitiveness. What we can tell from the evaluation is that LeEco's film, television and sports resources are indeed among the best in China. If you need to buy a member in this regard, you will not lose.
And the product itself, the system that most hinders Max2, can make the Snapdragon 820 and excellent flash memory and other hardware stuck. The 2K screen has a good visual effect and consumes some power, but the endurance of the machine is still acceptable. The photographic discrimination and white balance are amazing, but other aspects need to be improved. Whether it is industrial design or hardware, LeEco has almost piled up all the energy.
But the biggest problem is actually the comparison with our own 1000 yuan machine. The highly overlapping appearance design and system is a surprise in Le 2, but it is a bit difficult to put it in the flagship Le Max. Stronger hardware can not get a smoother experience, and the system has to carry the pot. It may be Le Max's biggest embarrassment that he didn't get high praise from his younger brother Le 2.
