LeEco ditches the 3.5mm jack, sells USB-C headphones

LeEco has released three new smartphones, none of which have the ubiquitous 3.5mm headphone jack. This move beats Apple to the punch, as the iPhone maker is said to be dumping the headphone jack in its next-generation smartphone. A patent appeared recently on the site for the US Patent & Trademark Office indicating that Apple plans to follow through on this. This means users will have to listen to audio through wireless headphones using Bluetooth or connect through the charging port. That port is USB type C on the new LeEco phones, but the iPhone uses Apple's proprietary Lightning connector. To make sure users are prepared, though, LeEco is selling two new USB-C headphones.

LeEco's Le 2 and Le 2 Pro are mid-tier phones running MediaTek's deca-core processor. This chip is getting picked up by several China suppliers now. Doogee showed off one such phone, the Doogee F7, at the April 2016 Mobile Electronics show in Hong Kong. MediaTek's processors are not known to have the same level of performance as those from competitors such as Qualcomm and Samsung, but the affordable SoCs from the Taiwan chip maker are common in China.

The big new release for LeEco is the Le Max 2. It runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, the chip in most premium flagship smartphones this year, and has a 5.7in QHD screen. Other elements of the phone are pretty standard for other recent models. The unit has an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner and a 3,100mAh battery, and supports Quick Charge 3.0. The front-facing camera is 8MP and the back is 21MP. The phone does stand out with 6GB of RAM, though, which is an improvement over the more common 4GB. It also comes with 64GB of storage. Users will be able to get all these for 2,499 yuan, which is less than $390.

LeEco is following the business model of other China companies by releasing smartphones with high-end specifications for an affordable price. By comparison, Samsung's Galaxy S7 goes for about $650 in the US. LeEco hopes to make up lost profits by selling services, similar to the strategy pursued by Xiaomi and others. This technique is also adopted by Amazon in the US, although it ditched the smartphone market in favor of tablets after its Fire Phone flopped. Even more than its competitors, LeEco seems committed to pushing users into the future at an inexpensive price.