[Device Reviews and Information] mkstevo:
I bought one!

Just to say that I've bought one of these Leagoo Venture 1 (V1) 'phones (16Gb, in the Amber Brown if you're interested...). I found information about them hard to come by so I thought I'd post a few thoughts a few days into ownership. If you have any questions, I'm not the person to ask as I don't visit XDA very often.

So, I took the plunge. I happened to be browsing AliExpress, looking for another item, when I spotted an advert for this 'phone. I was intrigued with the looks, that combination of leather and metal is hard to ignore. I clicked on the ad. and thought how striking looking the 'phone was, I also was rather taken by the looks of the launcher, with it's almost entirely black and white theme, I liked the simplicity.

Then, the price caught my eye. Just over one hundred pounds. At that price, I could almost afford to throw it away I reckoned. A few seconds later it was ordered. Delivery for me took eleven days although it was estimated at up to fifty days. Perhaps I was lucky in delivery? Other orders from AliExpress have taken sixty days, so maybe I was just lucky?

And what of the 'phone itself? It came in a reasonable quality cardboard box with a sleeve cut into a 'V' shape to highlight the 'Venture' brand on the front. Inside there was a SIM tray removal tool, charger with European pins and 100V - 240V capability, a micro-USB cable, headphones and quick-start guide. The 'phone had a screen protector fitted but this picked up so much grease and fingerprints I took it off after a day.

In use the screen is very clear, very bright and very sharp. As the resolution is only 1280x720 I wasn't expecting something this good. I've found no dead pixels so far either. The 'phone is very quick and responsive in general use, web sites load much much quicker than my previous Oppo R5 or Huawei P6 and I've noticed no slowdowns in use, nor any issues with excessive heating - again, both the Huawei and Oppo could get rather warm in use. The fingerprint scanner does take some time from putting the finger on the scanner to unlock the 'phone, though I suspect that the scanner works quickly, and the delay is in the unlocking as once or twice I've tapped my finger on quickly then removed it yet the 'phone has still unlocked with my finger off the scanner. The rear camera resolution seems average, it is claimed to be 13MP, pictures taken are ~4Mb in size and do look rather heavily compressed, the P6 and R5 possibly were both better in this respect. I don't suppose the camera is any worse than any other similarly priced 'phone though. For a while I had a Huawei P9 (Leica dual lens) and BlackBerry Priv, both had better cameras, I liked the BlackBerry Priv the most of all my 'phones for camera quality. I have an excellent Pentax camera for taking pictures with, I only use my 'phone if I've forgotten the Pentax or my reserve Ricoh cameras. If you use your 'phone for photography, perhaps consider something else? If I could add one thing, it would be NFC. I had a couple of 'phones for a short period which both had NFC and I really liked using 'Tap n Pay' so I would have liked to see this but it seems as though a minority of China made 'phones offer NFC as it reportedly isn't widely used in native China.

In the physical metal, glass and leather the 'phone looks very well made. It is rather heavy but this weight seems uniformly distributed and it feels 'right'. The metal on the sides has a quality finish to it and again, feels lovely. The metal surrounding the fingerprint scanner and camera lens looks to my eye to be cast aluminium and slightly lower quality but still very good. I can't say whether the leather is indeed calfskin as Leagoo claim, but it does look good. You probably could get some jealous looks from other people who might assume it is a Vertu (assuming they know what a Vertu looks like) as the two do look similar.

The 'phone has dual SIM capability, I haven't tried this only having one SIM and a microSD card in the 'SIM2' slot. It certainly works on the Virgin network in the UK (EE), again, I only have a standard 3G data plan so can't vouch for 4G capabilities.

Battery life so far has been excellent. Having used it more than I would during any normal day while setting it up, restoring apps, text messages, adding widgets and the like, I've still had around 70% battery by bedtime. In comparison, the P6 would be flat, with less use, in about eight hours. I could eke the R5 to about thirty six hours with very light use. If I remember, after my first week is over, I'll update this thread to give a more thorough report on the battery life. [Update] I've now had the 'phone for around four weeks and I'm getting very good battery life. I'm only having to charge the 'phone after three days of use. I recently had a BlackBerry Priv and before that, a Huawei P9 (not the P9 Lite), both of those managed from 8am on day one to 10pm day two before needing a charge. The V1 can easily go from 8am on day one to 10pm day three before needing a charge, if I stretch it, I can just squeeze 10pm on day four. This is without needing to select the low power battery saving mode. I am a light user, but I'm not using this any more or less than the previous 'phones yet still getting great battery life.

[Update] The stock launcher is a little unusual (even for a Chinese 'phone) in that widgets can't be resized from their original dimensions. Usually long pressing on a Widget brings up some resize arrows that can be used to stretch widgets into custom sizes, the Venture 1 launcher doesn't seem to have that option at all (or at least I haven't found it if it exists). Similar to other Chinese 'phones, there is no App drawer. All the Apps are located on the home screens. There seems to be no way of selecting which screen is designated as 'Home', the first screen is seemingly fixed as the 'Home' one. I have also found a few other 'inconsistencies' in some of the Apps. Leagoo include their own App store which appears to be a close clone of the native Android Play Store, but with the addition of being able to indicate the version number of an App along with an option to not update that App, or to skip an update. I haven't used the App myself other than to see what it was and if it differed from the Play Store, so I might have misinterpreted the way it works a little. The Leagoo Email App again appears to be a clone of an earlier version of the Android Gmail App. It has a black theme which better fits the overall theme of the 'phone so I use it in preference to the Gmail App. It requires all senders to be individually given the right to display pictures which I'm sure an earlier version of the Gmail App did. It is seemingly classed by Google as an 'insecure' Application so isn't allowed to access a Gmail account unless permission for insecure Apps is granted. This initially makes it appear as though the Email App isn't working. When it is setup with your user name and password, it reports that it can't connect and your username or password are incorrect. This had me confused for some time, when I logged onto my Gmail account on my iMac I could then see the warnings about an insecure app trying to access the account. Once permission was granted on the iMac, the Leagoo Email App worked as expected. The Leagoo Messages App has one other 'gotcha' which I'll pass on. If you are trying to save an attachment, long press on the attachment, select save from the menu and you are sent to a screen with a thumbnail of the attachment with what looks like a back arrow, a tickbox by the attachment, and nothing else. Going back doesn't save, long pressing the thumbnail doesn't save. Hmmm... Looking really closely on the top right of the screen reveals two OK and Cancel options - written in black text, over a black (leather texture) background. Clicking the OK option saves the attachment. Aha! Three days on and off it took me to realise that!

In summary, I love it, at the price there can't be many other 'phones that look anything like it, the fact that it performs far better than I expected is the icing on the cake. I couldn't give it a higher recommendation.

There is a video review which can by found by searching for: Leagoo V1 (Venture 1) Review English [4k] which I thought rather informative.