Swipe Telecom has recently released its budget smartphone Swipe Elite Power which is a lot different from previous smartphones from Swipe. The design in this smartphone is all new and specs are all you can expect in a budget smartphone. The USP of the smartphone is the battery, it comes with a large 4000 mAh battery which is the best part of the smartphone. Swipe Elite Power is available for Rs. 6,999 exclusively on Flipkart.
Unboxing and Specifications
Swipe Elite Power’s boxing is as simple as the phone, smartphone on the top and accessories below it. As the box lacks style, and so do the earphones, it comes with a wall adapter with no Swipe branding on it and a USB data cable. A SIM ejector pin, a warranty card and instructions manual are also included, let’s get to the specifications.
- Display: 5.5 inches HD IPS LCD, 160 PPI
- Camera: 8 MP rear and 5 MP front facing
- SoC: Quad core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1.09 GHz
- GPU: Adreno 304 @ 409 MHz
- RAM: 2 GB
- ROM: 16 GB
- OS: Android 6.0 Marshmallow
- Battery: 4000 mAh
Design
Swipe Elite Power looks similar to most of the Chinese branded smartphones; a silver metal enclosure and rear fitted fingerprint sensor. The one with white front panel looks like Google Pixel (only when the screen is off) because of the empty part above and below the display. The one we have here is the space gray with the black front panel.
The edges have a little curved and feel good in hands, and the fingerprint sensor is reachable on the back with one hand. On the back are the camera and loudspeaker with a little bump to keep the smartphone elevated on a flat surface and keeping the speaker from getting muffled. All the buttons and slots are located just on the right edge except for the mini-USB charging port; it’s on the top edge.
The build quality is not bad; the phone feels stiff and sturdy, also weighs similar to other same specs smartphones. Overall, the design and build quality is nice and feels pretty great in hands, only that there are no physical touch reactive navigation keys, but still, it got a large space below the display.
Display
The 5.5 inches screen is an IPS display with HD resolution which is a down point because 720p displays don’t look good and the pixel density is also very low; only 160 PPI. The viewing angles are not perfect; you will see color inversion with a little tilt of the phone. The sunlight readability on this display is not the best, but maximum brightness helps a bit.
Camera
Swipe Elite Power comes with 8 MP camera on the back with a single LED flash and captures pretty much mediocre shots, there is not much detail in pictures. The camera app is not much interesting, there are some pre-built filters and an HDR setting, but it doesn’t do much. The front facing camera is 5 MP, and it can capture some selfies for a profile picture on Facebook but can’t post them on Instagram. The best feature of the camera is that it can shoot Full HD video at 30 frames per second and it comes with face recognition.
Software
Most of the Swipe smartphones comes with Freedom OS layered on Android, but Swipe Elite Power came with stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow installed. Although the launcher isn’t a stock from Android it works similarly to one. It comes with some third party apps preinstalled, and the Software Updater app is the only one in the name of bloatware. Overall the user interface experience is smooth and snappy; no lags were experienced even though I was using a custom launcher instead of the stock one.
Performance
Swipe Elite Power comes with a 1.1 GHz quad-core processor and 2 GB RAM which is a little low for multitasking and gaming. Well, you can easily handle few light apps and let them multitask simultaneously, but it reloads browser pages (multiple tabs) while multitasking. The high-end games like Modern Combat 5 and Asphalt 8 are almost unplayable with the low frame rate and sudden freeze. There was no need of benchmarking the phone, but still, I’ve done some, here you go.
Now to the hardware which is the best part of this smartphone; the 4000 mAh marathon battery. The battery works excellent you can use this phone for several days if you don’t play games and do the heavy stuff. Well, it took five whole hours to charge this battery to 100% with the wall adapter included and with my quick charger. Playing games creates a lot of heat at the back panel but as soon as you turn off the game, the phone cool down amazingly fast, I haven’t seen any phone getting cool this fast.
Pros
- Good design and build quality
- Fingerprint scanner (at this price range)
- Big battery
Cons
- Poor display
- Poor camera
- Laggy performance
Bottom Line
This smartphone comes with some features which I cannot imagine in this price range, like the 4000mAh battery which works superb and a fingerprint scanner. These feature is making this smartphone a better choice than all the other smartphone in the market falling in the same price range. If you want your first smartphone, then this could be the one because of the metal design and you are getting the best features in it including the fingerprint security.
