Swipe ELITE 2 Review

Swipe ELITE 2 came out a while back as a little brother to the bigger Swipe ELITE. This time it was more focused on being a better budget phone under 5K. For a long time, the cheaper end Android smartphones were terrible because of poor software support and lack of a proper camera which all changed when Motorola entered the market which pushed the limit for the quality of the budget smartphone. Let’s take a look if ELITE 2 is worthy of becoming a budget smartphone in our Swipe ELITE 2 Review.

SWIPE Elite 2 is a small phone by today’s standards, with a 4.5 inch IPS display. From a normal viewing distance, it has a sharp display even though the estimate is around 255 PPI. The device has a really good feel and comfortable to hold for long hours without feeling cheap. It has a protruding camera lens to make the device very thin to hold, also allowing easy one handed use of the phone.

Camera is very important for a lot of the smartphone users and this packs a 8 Megapixel rear camera with autofocus. The last time I tried a phone which was under 7K was Motorola Moto E and It has a terrible camera. The camera on this device performs well in a well-lit condition. It’s pretty bad under low light. The front facing 5 Megapixel camera isn’t the most terrible camera for snapchat or selfies, but the lighting situation plays an important role.

Camera software shipped with the phone usually has a lot of gimmicky features on a lot of smartphone with tons of filters and whatnot, but I found the app to stick to clicking pictures easily and all the settings kept under the hood. There was an interesting inclusion of Object Tracking in the video mode to keep objects or people in focus during video recording which is noticeably found in higher end smartphones by default.

During the flooding in Chennai, I shot a couple of videos with Swipe ELITE 2 and posted it on Twitter. I was impressed with the video performance of the device. Overall, the rear camera is pretty good for the price. Using the camera for a long time made the area around the rear camera warm, especially when I tried to shoot tons of pictures continuously. 

Swipe ELITE 2 comes with Android 5.1 Lollipop running Freedom OS skin over it. Freedom OS adds a bit of customisation features to make the device more personalised. This device currently runs on Freedom OS 1.1 and does not hinder with the overall performance of the phone. It does come with a couple of bloatware applications and a custom search bar which can be changed from Swipe to Google or DuckDuckGo.

Two notable apps created by SWIPE are SwipeBox and Swipe Beautify. Swipe Beautify provides a large selection of wallpapers and app themes for the Swipe launcher. SwipeBox allows you to connect all your cloud storage accounts and categorises the files as documents, videos or images, thus also allowing you to take a look the files by size and last modified. It’s a great tool to monitor all your cloud stored files. It provides support for the major cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Mega and One Drive. It also can be used as a file manager for the device storage. An interesting feature is it provides a feature to find duplicates across your device and merge them to free up space.

Is it a worth budget smartphone? Yes. It’s a worthy of the title budget phone under 5K. the device ever comes with a scratch protector and phone case cover, which some people spend another 500 bucks (depends on the quality you look for). It’s pretty nice deal.