Swipe Elite Plus Review: Budget Phones Redefined

Swipe is a company which has been around in India for a while and here’s our Swipe Elite Plus Review, which is their latest entry to the Indian market. Previously, we reviewed the Swipe Elite 2, and you can check it out here. We had a lot of expectations while doing the Swipe Elite Plus Review because we were very impressed with the Swipe Elite 2.

Design

Starting with the design for the Swipe Elite Plus Review, it has a 5-inch display in the front with the speaker grill on the top and capacitive buttons under the screen. It has a nice shiny grey home button, and other buttons are backlit when you power the phone ON. The volume rocker and the power button is on the right and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the top. There’s a Micro-USB port on the bottom to charge and sync data, the speaker grill to it’s right and the microphone grill to the left.

There are a couple of metal bands which run along the sides, giving it a nice look. The back is made of plastic, but it has a nice textured finish to it which makes it comfortable to hold. On the top, there’s the camera module and right below that there’s the single-tone flash. There is no Swipe branding on the phone, but there’s an ELITE branding right below the flash.

The phone comes in two different colours: Midnight Blue and White. For our Swipe Elite Plus Review, we got the White, which looks glossy on the front and pearl white on the back.

Hardware

The Swipe Elite Plus is a Dual-SIM phone. You can have two Micro SIMs, and both of them can support 4G at the same time. There is no support for VoLTE though. Apart from the SIM, it has the other usual connectivity like Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and Wifi b/g/n.

Display

One of the most important aspects of any phone is its display, and if a display is bad, it is a huge deal breaker. But while doing the SwipeElite Plus Review, we were thoroughly impressed with the display. It uses a 1080P display sourced from Sharp. This is something that has never been seen before on a phone in this range. The display is excellent and the calibration has been done well. There is no issue of over saturation or ghost effects. Watching movies or playing games is a pleasure, thanks to the amazing display.

Camera

The camera is another aspect we were impressed with while doing the Swipe Elite Plus Review. The phone has a 13MP primary camera with Single-Tone flash and 8MP Secondary Camera. The camera modules have been sourced from Samsung.

The Primary Camera is fast to focus and snap photos. The colour reproduction was excellent, except for greens. Greens were over-saturated. It is not visible when you shot outdoors, but it is visible when you shoot indoors under artificial light. This can be corrected with a software update, and I hope Swipe does it. Apart from this, we discovered a Manual Mode while doing the Swipe Elite Plus Review. This manual mode is a nice addition which lets you set the White Balance, Focus, Shutter Speed and ISO manually.

Here are some of the photos shot on the primary camera:

The 8MP Secondary Camera was also equality impressive. It was fast to capture photos and captured true skin colours without over processing it. This is something that every company should follow. But it does have the ‘Face Beauty’ mode which smoothens your face, if you fancy it.

Here are some of the photos shot on the secondary camera:

Battery

The phone comes with a 3050mAh non-removable battery, and the battery is something we were not impressed with while doing the Swipe Elite Plus Review. With medium usage, the battery barely lasted a day and with heavy usage we had to charge it midway through the day. Though the battery is large enough, it’s efficiency was not so much. Also, the phone does not have fast charging, and it would take some time to charge it.

Internals and Performance

For our Swipe Elite Plus Review, we did not have much expectations for the internals and performance, considering the price. But it did exceed our expectations. The phone has 2GB RAM, 16GB Storage, which is expandable up to 32GB via Micro-SD card and is powered by a Quad-Core 1.5Ghz Snapdragon 615 Processor. The choice of the processor is superb, and the phone does perform. But the 2GB RAM shows up when you’re switching between many apps on a busy day.

Also, the phone does heat up on extensive usage or while using heavy apps. It gets warm, but not unbearably hot.

Software

The Swipe Elite Plus runs on Android 5.0.2 Lollipop with their skin which Swipe calls, FreedomOS. We are fans of Pure Stock Android, and FreedomOS is close to that. It does not come with a lot of bloatware, but just a few additions here and there.

You get a set of handy widgets which are always on the Lock screen. These include things like Wifi Toggle, Data and the calculator. Once you’re inside, swiping down on the home screen will once again bring up a new set of toggles apart from the one which comes by default. Swiping up would bring the Swipe Search, which can search through your phone and also the internet. Apart from that, I don’t see many customizations done to the Software, and it should feel like home.

Verdict

Starting with the Swipe Elite Plus Review, we did not have many expectations, and we were genuinely blown away after a few days with it. It offers a 1080P display from Sharp, a 13MP Primary and 8MP Secondary Camera from Samsung and a Quad Core Processor from Snapdragon. All of this, at a price of Rs. 6,999. The only concern for us with the phone is its battery. Otherwise, we can’t think of any other phone in this range which can offer what the Swipe does. If your budget is under Rs. 10,000, this is the phone to get!

The Swipe Elite Plus is priced at Rs. 6,999 and it is a Flipkart Exclusive. Click here to buy one now!