Swipe Technologies has launched their latest offering in the Budget segment recently, the Elite Plus which appears promising on the specs sheet with a pretty aggressive price tag for what is being offered. It is a pretty interesting smartphone priced at Rs. 6,999 having some tough competition to take on.
So let us look into the device taking into consideration how well the device performs in real life usage and the practicality of how the impressive specs sheet applies to daily usage. We will be looking into each aspect of the device like design, performance, battery life, etc. after having used it for a couple of weeks.
Box Contents of Swipe Elite Plus:
It comes with the Handset, travel charger, data cable, manual. There are not Earphones included in the box.
Design and Display
These are a couple of factors which can be considered as positives for the device, on first glance the device looks premium, with a silver rim running around the smartphone. The feel of the device is quite as well, it fits in well in your hand thanks to the 5-inch display size and the slightly curved back of the device. The back panel is made of plastic and looks good but is quite thin and you know it when you open the panel.
It has a pattern on it which gives you good grip and feel as well. The device comes with Elite logo on the back of the device, with the camera on top of it with the LED flash below it. The power button and the volume rockers are on the right side of the device with the audio jack and the mic are located on the top with the micro USB and speaker located on the bottom. Overall look wise the Swipe Elite Plus looks premium for the price at which it is offered.
The Display is another positive of the device, it comes with a 5-inch Full HD display which is quite impressive for the price tag. The colors are pretty accurate and brightness levels are good even in outdoor lighting under direct sunlight. The viewing angles are good and the touch response is accurate. The front of the device has the Home button and two capacitive touch buttons on either side of it. The capacitive buttons are backlit which makes them visible in dark conditions as well.
Performance
The Swipe Elite Plus is powered by a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor with clocking speeds of 1.5GHz coupled with Adreno 405 GPU and it comes with 2GB of RAM along with 16GB internal storage which is expandable with a separate microSD card slot. On first boot the user gets around 1.2GB of Free RAM out of the 2GB and 11GB of free storage space out of the 16GB. After having used the device for a couple of weeks as my secondary device, it performed quite well, there was little or almost no lag during multitasking. The device just goes through your daily work like browsing, using facebook ,Whatsapp, twitter, Snapchat etc like a breeze. Found the occasional lag but nothing which was uncomfortable.
Gaming was decent as well, you cannot expect to play high-end games on a budget smartphone but surprisingly found that some games were running smoothly, games like GTA V, Asphalt 5, NFS etc did not run smoothly in high-quality mode but was manageable in medium quality mode. The UI appears to be the culprit when it comes to the device sometimes acting up, we will be talking about it in detail later on in the post.
Camera
The rear camera of the device actually surprised me, it sports a 13MP camera with Samsung sensor and f/2.0 aperture which is not just good on paper for the price range but performs exceptionally well. The field of depth is quite impressive and the focusing with adjustments in exposure was commendable. The front camera is an 8MP shooter which also does a very impressive job for selfies etc. You can check out the images to get an idea about the image quality which this budget smartphone is capable of.
In the default camera app, you get Auto mode, Panorama, Manual Mode which lets you play around with ISO, Shutter speeds from 1/2 to 1/2000, White balance etc. You have time lapse option in the default camera app itself along with QR code scanner and Face beauty option for the rear camera. For the front camera, you get the Auto mode and Face beauty options only. You can record up to 1080p resolution videos with the Swipe Elite Plus Camera. By default you will be having 10MP or 16:9 size set, to get the full resolution of 13MP or 4:3 you can change it by going into settings. The camera is one of the major positives for the device and it will surely give it an edge over other devices with which it competes.
Check Camera Samples of Swipe Elite Plus: Link
User Interface
One of the things which lets down such an amazing device is the UI, with Freedom OS on top of Android Lollipop 5.0.2 appears to be a pretty average skin over Android OS. Swipe has mentioned that there are significant improvements in the UI but it is not that fluid and smooth as expected.
You get gestures controls like double-tap to wake the device, one that I liked in the UI was the option to add shortcuts on the Lock screen itself and you can add any app as a shortcut which is quite useful and saves a lot of time. The UI needs significant improvement to be called a good UI and hope that future updates will endure that.
Battery
It runs on a 3050mAh battery which is non-removable and with moderate usage it was able to last more than a day easily for the past couple of weeks which is quite good. As it comes with a Full HD display I was expecting the battery to not last long, was able to get around 4-5 hours of screen on time.
Final Verdict
The Elite Plus is a great offering from Swipe Technologies carrying an affordable price tag with impressive specs to go with it. It can be a decent device for a first-time smartphone user and with the neat design, it can appeal to youngsters as well who are on a budget. The positives of the device are its premium look with lightweight making it easy to handle and use. The Camera is impressive for a device priced at Rs. 6,999 and has smooth performance as well, the Freedom OS UI seems to be the culprit for occasional lag which I had encountered.
Thanks for the positive review, it’d help a lot who have included this in their buying list.