Online video company Letv unveiled its latest smarphone, Le 1s, with an all metal body, fingerprint ID and fast charging technology, which was proudly described as “the first phone to be sold at a price lower than its cost”.

It is available at a “breakthrough CNY1099 ($173) price”, offering a number of features usually unavailable in this segment.

The company said that in the six months since its first product launch, it has “redefined mobile phones with its ecosystem model, pushing the industry from the smartphone era into the ecosystem era”.

It appears to be aiming for a model similar to that of Amazon with its Fire products, with lower-cost hardware serving as a way to get its content services into the hands of consumers in order to generate additional revenue.

The new device will not be bundled with Letv media membership, giving it an additional potential revenue stream.

The device is powered by MediaTek’s high-end Helio X10 processor, with 3G of RAM, 32GB of storage, and USB-C port. The company claimed it has “the world’s first mirror fingerprint sensor”, which can double-up as a camera shutter button.

It runs the EUI 5.5 operating system, an Android variant “providing seamless access to Letv’s world-class ecosystem and content services”.

At an event earlier this year, Letv launched three “Le Superphones”, and since then sales have exceeded 1 million units, making it the fastest among all new brands to reach this threshold, it claimed.