Dilemma : Which one should you buy?

To start off, both the Le Max2 and the OnePlus 3 boast of top-end specifications in almost every department – 6GB RAM, 64GB Internal Memory, at least a 3000 mAh Battery, support for the latest Wi-Fi standards and almost all network frequencies! As a result, both are snappy, fast and powerhouses when it comes to performance - playing high-end games on either of these phones is a breeze! So, what sets them apart? A few things…

DESIGN & BUILD

OnePlus tried something new this time - an all-metal build! They’ve done a good job with this and the smartphone is light and feels solid. On the other hand, LeEco has become a pro at creating premium all-metal smartphones! They’ve been doing this since their first smartphone - the Le 1, and their design has just gotten better and better. Symmetry rules!

CAMERA

In this department, while the Le Max2 has a higher Mega Pixel count, that’s not the end of the story. As serious photographers will tell you, Mega Pixels matter, but so do other things like Aperture and Photo Processing. OnePlus has a standard camera on their flagship – its good but not great. The Le Max2 captures better low-light photos and natural color tones!

SOUND

The OnePlus 3 has the usual 3.5 mm analog audio port but LeEco is trying something new with its Continual Digital Lossless Audio (CDLA) standard delivered through the USB Type-C port! We’ve seen prior studies about audio quality drops when routed through the 3.5 mm analog port and some blind tests on the web show better quality music through CDLA but we wanted to try it ourselves. And guess what? It is true! Listening to music on the Le Max2 with the CDLA earphones was, literally, “music to our ears”! The bass, the trebles, the mids and the highs – it leaves nothing out, and we felt that we were listening to the song as the composer meant it to be heard! Forget all the hoopla about custom DACs on smartphones, if the industry follows this, we’ll not need to worry about audio quality at all – for the vast majority of us.

CONTENT

The future is here and content is king! This revolution in India was started by LeEco in February this year and we can already see major players scrambling to bundle some kind of content with their smartphones. Xiaomi gave away a few months of Hungama Music along with their smartphones, and now OnePlus gives users a 1 year subscription to Saavn Pro for all their music listening needs. But, as you’d expect, LeEco is the king of this business-model, and the 1 year LeEco Membership that comes bundled with the Le Max2 is huge! LeEco is also working to bring Live Concerts to their customers’ smartphones – this is entertainment like never before!

Well, that’s about all we could think of as key differentiators between these two flagships! But there’s one last thing…

PRICE

The OnePlus 3 comes in only one storage variant and will set you back by 28K. But the Le Max2 comes in two storage variants – the 4GB RAM and 32GB Internal Storage variant will cost you 23K while the 6GB RAM and 64GB Internal Storage variant will be a little more expensive at 30K.

VERDICT

In our opinion, the Le Max2 6GB RAM variant is a smart buy because it gives you the highest storage capacity, the faster performance, better audio quality and, most importantly, the biggest catalog of content! There’s so many ways that the LeEco Membership adds value to the end-user that it boggles the mind – you can’t consume all that content even if you try!

Yes, the highest variant of the Le Max2 costs 2K more than the OnePlus 3, but its more “value for money” because you’ll not have to worry about any additional costs when you want to listen to music, watch movies, catch the latest news from your favorite TV channel or even when you want to store your data in the cloud! And if you’re on a budget, just go for the lower variant of the Le Max2 – it performs as well as any flagship on the market, gives you access to all that content, and costs you 5K less than the OnePlus 3. And check out the offers on Flipkart and LeMall.com – they are giving away free CDLA earphones, 10% cashback and more! After all, money saved is money growing!

After Samsung and Xiaomi launched their flagship smartphone, now HTC will launch its flagship smartphone tomorrow i.e. May 26. This year Samsung had launched Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge and Xiaomi had launched Xiaomi Mi 5 at the MWC 2016. It seems as if companies have been quick to bring their flagship smartphones to the Indian shores. Now HTC is all set to launch its latest flagship smartphone, HTC 10, in India tomorrow. HTC had already unveiled HTC 10 in Taiwan last month.

Key highlighted specifications of the smartphone are:

• The smartphone has 5.2-inch QHD Super LCD 5 display covered with Corning Gorilla Glass protection.
• It has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor with 4GB of RAM for faster speed. It has expendable storage of upto 2TB (MicroSD) with inbuild storage of 32GB and 64GB.
• Smartphone has 3,000mAh battery and Quick Charge 3.0 support.
• Connectivity options on the smartphone include 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC and USB Type-C port for charging and data transfer.
• In the photography department, the HTC 10 has 12-Ultrapixel rear camera of aperture f/1.8, optical image stabilization (OIS) and laser autofocus with 5-megapixel selfie camera with OIS. 
• It also supports 4K video recording capabilities. HTC 10 also supports 24-bit Hi-Res audio recording capabilities, which claims to capture up to 256 times more detail compared to standard recordings.
• Device has unique metallic body design, physical home button embedded with a fingerprint scanner.
• In the US, HTC 10 costs $699, which is approximately Rs 46,400, so it is expected to be available at around Rs 46,400 in India. 
• With the LG G5 available for pre-order at Rs 52,990 on Flipkart and the Samsung Galaxy S7 priced at Rs 48,990, it will be interesting to see how competitive HTC can get with its India pricing.

To know more about the device and launch event stay tuned with us.

• Participants were asked to read a short story by author David Sedaris on either a physical printout (non-digital) or in a PDF on a PC laptop (digital), and were then asked to take a pop-quiz, paper-and-pencil comprehension test. For the abstract questions, on average, participants using the non-digital platform scored higher on inference questions with 66 percent correct, as compared to those using the digital platform, who had 48 percent correct. On the concrete questions, participants using the digital platform scored better with 73 percent correct, as compared to those using the non-digital platform, who had 58 percent correct.
• Participants were asked to read a table of information about four, fictitious Japanese car models on either a PC laptop screen or paper print-out, and were then asked to select which car model is superior. Sixty-six percent of the participants using the non-digital platform (printed materials) reported the correct answer, as compared to 43 percent of those using the digital platform.
• Triggering a more abstract mindset prior to an information processing task on a digital platform appeared to help facilitate a better performance on tasks that require abstract thinking. Specifically, 48 percent of participants reported the correct answer to the Japanese car judgement task after completing a priming activity intended to activate a high-level of construal in which they were tasked to take on an abstract mindset, as compared to the 30 percent, who answered correctly without the priming activity.