Swipe is an Indian company and its smartphones have always catered to the need of Indian consumers. However, with the aggressive Chinese brands, its devices failed to offer the VFM factor. The latest offering from Swipe, dubbed Elite Note aims to change that by competing with budget offerings from Xiaomi, YU and Meizu. It has an attractive price tag of Rs 6,499 and yet manages to pack a punch. Let’s see if it succeeds to knock the competition.
Build and Design
Swipe Elite Note has a candy-bar shape as most smartphones, however the main change is at the back, as it sports the sandstone finish. It offers good feel in the hand and also gives a comfortable grip to the user. After popping out the rear panel, there are two micro-SIM card slots along with a microSD card slot. Although the size of smartphone is good with its compact display of 5-inches, it feels little bulky to hold.
The front panel consists camera and sensor at the top of the display. The buttons are at the bottom of the display, but they lack backlighting.
The rear panel has “Elite” logo at the bottom side and rear camera at the top along with the flash. The 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port are at the top edge. The volume rocker keys and the power button is at the right edge. The bezels of the smartphone are not very thick and gives a good design to the smartphone.
Display
The Swipe Elite Note comes with a 5-inch HD display with 1280×720 pixels resolution. The display is good but not as impressive as the competition. The colour reproduction is average and it also lacks the sharpness or brightness. That said, The viewing angles of the smartphone is quite good but struggles under the sunlight. The bezels are a bit thick.
Hardware and Software
The smartphone is powered by 1.3GHz quad-core Mediatek processor and 2GB of RAM. It has 16GB of inbuilt memory out of which user get 12.24GB of free memory, also the storage can be expandable up to 32GB via microSD card. The given specifications are impressive for its asking price.
However, the smartphone is a bit laggy in terms of usage and multitasking. It takes time to open any app or even the inbuilt features like camera and setting. It takes the time to switch between different apps too. So I didn’t find it very good in terms of performance. The gaming performance of the smartphone is also not good, simple games run well but high-end games like Asphalt 8 or Modern Combat runs slow and lag a lot of time. The phone suffers heating issue a lot of times while playing games, using the camera and using Wi-Fi.
The benchmark performance of the smartphone in AnTuTu and Quadrant Standard are 24567 and 9363 respectively which is good but not so great.
The smartphone is running on Android 5.1 Lollipop with its custom UI on the top of it. The UI is good but not so impressive. It has very less amount of customization modes. Also, the device comes with lots of bloatware like CM cleaner, Daily Hunt, Bobble, Omni Swipe, Magzter, Swipe Store, Swipe Box and Swipe Beauty.
The multimedia features of the smartphones are good. The sound production can be better but sometimes I felt that it is out of sync while playing a video. Audio playback is quite good though.
Camera
The rear panel sports an 8-megapixel rear facing camera along with Auto-focus and LED flash. It takes decent photos in terms of given specification. In daylight, the captures images have a good amount of details and colours. The low light performance of the smartphone is not good.
The inbuilt camera app is good but lacks in functionality and different modes. The front camera is of 5-megapixel and takes decent selfies but also it lacks in colour reproduction.
Battery and Connectivity
It is packed with 3,000mAh of battery, which is really impressive. It gives me around 15 hours of running time with my moderate usage like games, camera, video playback, Net surfing through Wi-Fi and mobile data. For normal users, it can easily last a day or even more.
It is a Dual-SIM smartphone with 3G connectivity on both. It supports micro-SIM at the both slot. The calling facility of the smartphone is good and I didn’t face any call drop in it. The incoming voice is good and clear to listen and answer. Sadly, it only supports 3G, while the competition offers 4G support.
Gizmo Verdict
In my opinion, the smartphone is good on paper and hence might please budget users. At a price tag of Rs 6,500 , it might seem better than the competition, but in real life, options like the Coolpad Note 3 Lite and Xiaomi Redmi 2 Prime comes across as a better package.
