Leagoo’s newest Shark 1 Android smartphone is taking on the giants of smartphones. It’s big, with a huge 6-inch IPS display, and even bigger, with a really humongous 6300 mAh battery. Yet, the Shark 1’s body is just 8.5 mm thin, and still packs all the impressive specifications you’d expect from a premium smartphone, including fingerprint sensor and more.
The Shark 1 is the first smartphone in Leagoo’s new Shark series. They already have two other series of smartphones, the Alfa and Elite. The Shark is positioned to be their top-end offering. The price, however, remains quite affordable.
I was supplied with the gold colour Shark 1. It arrived yesterday and I’m excited to share a quick first-impressions post about it. Two other colours are available, black and silver.
With a 6-inch display, the Shark 1 is definitely quite a handful to hold, but yet not excessively so. Leagoo has managed to squeeze everything into a body that’s smaller in every dimension than, say, the Motorola Nexus 6. That’s despite the Shark 1’s 6300 mAh battery, almost twice the size of what the Nexus 6 has.
The Shark 1 is really beautiful. It’s all-metal body, together with a 2.5D curved Corning Gorilla Glass 3 over the display, screams premium. It’s a bit hefty though, weighing at 240.9 g, no doubt due to the huge battery within.
The full-HD 1920×1080 resolution LTPS display is bright and crisp. Colours are vibrant, and accurate. The 368 PPI pixel density is quite adequate, and overall, I really liked the display quality.
Under the hood, the Shark 1 is powered by a 64-bit octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor. All its eight A53 cores are clocked at 1.5 GHz. There’s 3GB of DDR3 RAM onboard, and while the 16GB of flash storage might be a little small by today’s standards, there is a microSD expansion slot available.
The Shark 1 supports LTE (FDD) band 1/3/7/8/20, WCDMA 900/2100, and GSM 850/900/1800/1900. Every band used in Singapore is supported in the Shark 1, guaranteeing you get the best coverage in every corner of Singapore. There’s also dual-SIM support, with dual standby. The second SIM slot is also used to hold the microSD card, which means you can either have a second SIM or use a microSD card, but not both at the same time.
The Shark 1’s main camera on the back has 13MP resolution, with LED flash, while the front camera has 5MP resolution.
Finally, there’s also a fingerprint sensor. Leagoo refers to this as Fingerprint ID 3.0 with 360° identification that recognises fingerprints in 0.39 seconds. The sensor is placed on the back, like on the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X. Personally, I find the Nexus 6P’s and Nexus 5X’s fingerprint sensors to perform far better, but regardless, the Shark 1’s fingerprint sensor is functional and provides a convenient way to unlock the smartphone.
Leagoo ships the Shark 1 with Android 5.1 Lollipop. Their software theming is quite pleasant. Interestingly, the icon colours in the default selected theme matches exceptionally well with the gold colour Shark 1, as you can probably tell from the photo above.
The big 6300 mAh battery, incidentally, can also be used to charge another device. Yes, that means the Shark 1 can double up as a battery power bank, so you can top-up the juice on some other gadget that you carry around with you. The Shark 1 itself, according to Leagoo, can do 72 hours of talk-time (yes, 3 days straight of continuous talking).
The Leagoo Shark 1 will be available for sale from next week at S$399. It is initially available only from SingTel.
I’ll be back with a more comprehensive review. Watch this blog or follow my Facebook page for updates!
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