LeEco SuperTVs to go on sale today; Here are things to keep in mind before hitting that Buy button

Chinese conglomerate LeEco is all set to sell its Super TVs in India today on both LeMall as well as Flipkart. The pre-orders for the Super3 smart TVs starts from today and will go on till 12 August. HDFC debit and credit card users will get a Rs 5000 cash back on purchasing any of the three TVs along with free shipping and installation. The three TVs on sale are Super3 X55 which is priced at Rs 59,790; the Super3 X65 which is priced at Rs 99,790 and the Super3 Max65 3D Smart TV which is priced at Rs 1,49,790. If you compare the prices of the LeEco TVs with similarly specced 4K TVs from the established players such as LG, Samsung, Sony, you will notice that there is a significant price gap. LeEco believes in selling its hardware at a very aggressive price point as has been demonstrated with its handsets. The company is trying a similar tactic with TVs as well. Now while it has tasted success in the smartphone segment, giving Xiaomi and other budget players a shock with its Le 1s and Le 2 handsets, TVs is a completely different segment. A lot of probable TV buyers are looking at a long term investment, and once a TV is bought, unlike a smartphone, the customer expects at least a 3-4 year life cycle from it. So as far as TVs are concerned, the stress on after sales service becomes quite important. LeEco is offering a 2-year warranty on the complete unit and a 4-year warranty on the panel. LeEco’s giving high end specs such as 4K resolution, Android 5.0 with eUI 5.5 interface and so on. The cheapest 55-inch model is equipped with 2GB RAM and 8GB internal storage. On the other hand, the 65-inch models gets 3GB of RAM and 16GB onboard storage. All three are powered by a 1.4GHz quad-core processor that is coupled with Mali GPU. On the audio front, the TVs come equipped with 2.1 stereo speakers with Dolby Audio and DTS support. The specs sheet includes support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Additionally, there is also the Supertainment package where in LeEco will bundle in Rs 9,800 worth of audio and video content free for two years since the day of buying. Along with this, you will also get access to 5TB of free cloud storage as well. We have tested the LeEco handsets, and the Supertainment package isn’t very different from what we got on the smartphones. Honestly, apart from the initial novelty value, in its current state the Supertainment features don’t really have that much of a pull. Apart from Live TV which lets you catch up on news and entertainment from your favourite TV channels in real time, we found the other content partners such to be providing stale content. There wasn’t really any daily or even weekly refresh of the home page or the content on offer. The LeView content curation is quite irrelevant to say the least. For instance, on selecting ‘Travel and Events’ as an interest area, I just got video suggestions of trains and railway stations, as though the channel is curated by some Railways fan boy. There have also been instances of smutty video suggestions on some friends’ devices. So while the LeEco is offering immense value with its Super TV’s, there is definitely work to be done on the content side. Furthermore, if you have cable connection, the YuppTV offering in the Supertainment package is redundant. LeEco recently announced that it will be investing Rs 1330 crore in content aggregation  for the Indian market. Apart from being in talks with local content producers and international studios for content tie-ups, LeEco has also started work towards developing in-house shows and formats. This is definitely a good sign. All in all, the LeEco TVs as a standalone TV set still offers better price proposition than other established players, at least on paper. We will have to wait till we testing the TVs thoroughly to talk about the performance and overall user experience.