LeEco Spoils its Own Smartphone Surprise for U.S. Market Ahead of Oct 19 Announcement

Chinese device maker LeEco wants to launch a range of smartphones for the U.S. market on the 19th of October, but someone at the company inadvertently listed the phones on the company’s site well ahead of the actual launch.

Fortunately, some quick-fingered users grabbed some screenshots of the phones before the links were pulled down.

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The users who discovered the snafu on the company’s online shop noticed the two smartphone models above, and also 4 new television sets that the company will presumably launch on the 19th.

The more expensive of the two smartphones is the 5.7-inch Le Max 2, to be sold at a discounted $289. The other is called the Le S3 Superphone that’s slightly smaller at 5.5 inches at $169 after discount.

The TVs are all 4K models, three of which are from the LeEco Super4 family, the X43, X55 and X65, which likely indicates the screen sizes. The fourth is the uMax85. None of the prices were caught for the TV sets, but users did notice that there was no Vizio branding on the TVs. They will be shipped under LeEco’s own brand. LeEco bought Vizio, the California-based TV manufacturing company for about $2 billion this July, but it’s obvious that LeEco is not going to piggyback on that brand.

It’s also interesting to note that the TVs will probably run Android TV instead of Vizio’s smart TV technology.

LeEco, officially called Leshi Internet Information and Technology, is a Beijing-based company that is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The company is one of the leading online video companies in China.

LeEco has recently been on a shopping spree, announcing its planned acquisition Dichotomy Creative Group two months after the Vizio, Inc. deal was made public. The company has also set up a U.S.-based film studio called Le Vision Entertainment.

LeEco also owns a unit called Letv Cloud Computing, a pioneer in what is known as Video-as-a-Service. Essentially, Letv Cloud is an open source platform for cloud-based video streaming. The company held a joint press conference with Microsoft in Beijing last year to announce that they have signed a deal for solution compatibility where Letv cloud video software will work on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

So, the company definitely wants to make inroads to the U.S. market in several different ways. Selling smartphones and television sets is one way to go about it, but LeEco’s video platform could be one other way to capture market share in the country.

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