The Letv Max Pro is the world's first Snapdragon 820 phone. And yes, I know: many of you have no freaking clue what Letv is, and until recently, I was just like you. Letv is a Chinese consumer electronics and software company, kind of similar in some ways (though very different in others) to Xiaomi. They've built smartphones before, but the Letv Max Pro is easily the most internationally paid-attention-to device they've produced.

The reason for that has literally nothing to do with Letv: it's all about Qualcomm. The Max Pro is the first phone with a Snapdragon 820 processor, a chip enthusiasts have been eyeing intently after a dismal year, in large part, for Qualcomm's Snapdragon portfolio. The 808 wasn't very fast, the 810 tended to get hot and also wasn't very fast, and even the company's mid-range chips (like the 615 and 410) just felt like they under-delivered.

The big change in the 820 is that Qualcomm is back in the CPU core design business, with their Kryo quad-core processor at the heart of the SoC. That's far from the only big change in the 820, but it's the one that's really got a lot of people interested.

So, is the Max Pro fast? Sure, I guess. Here's the thing: in the way we were allowed to use it, speed was basically impossible to measure. We weren't allowed to run benchmarks (I'm not saying others haven't, though), and there were no known particularly performance-intensive apps there to mess with (this phone doesn't have the Play Store).

Aside from the 820, the Max Pro has a 6.3" QHD LCD display, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, up to 128GB of storage, an infrared blaster, Qualcomm's Sense ID ultrasonic fingerprint tech, MHL, USB type C (2.0), a 3400mAh battery, and runs a heavily modified version of Android 6.0.

Will the Max Pro ever come to America? Realistically, that seems very unlikely, but the company wasn't willing to rule it out by default.

As a note, I'm sorry about the ghastly colors in some of these photos - Letv had some rather... interesting lighting in their booth.