Swipe Elite Plus Review- Good, but not the Best

Swipe launched its budget offering a few days back the Elite Plus which is exclusive to Flipkart and comes loaded with impressive specifications for a budget phone. It has 5 inches Full HD display and is powered by Snapdragon 615 Octa-Core chipset with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage.

The device is priced Rs 6,999. So is the device value for money at this price? Let’s find out in this detailed review.

Design and Build:

Design wise, Swipe Elite Plus is a good looking budget offering with a slim design. Another good aspect about the design of Swipe Elite Plus is the weight, at 131gms, it is incredibly light to use especially with the 5-inch display. The build quality of the phone is also very good considering the price segment. It has a matte finish rear panel with circular patterns, Elite branding and the 13MP rear camera with flash. The front panel has three capacitive buttons out of which back and multitasking buttons are backlit.

The edges of the device have two chrome strips running with a matte finish between them. The speaker unit is located at the bottom while the 3.5 mm audio jack is at the top. Overall, considering the price of the phone, we feel it comes with great design and build.

Display:

Swipe Elite Plus is one of the very few devices (or rather the only one) which offers Full HD display at 7k INR price segment. The phone comes with a 5 inch Full HD (1080p) display with IPS LCD panel. The display is durable and well-protected against scratches, thanks to Dragontrail glass. The display is crisp and sharp and has good color quality as well. The touch response is also very good on the display. Overall, the full HD display on the Swipe Elite Plus is a good one.

Software:

Swipe Elite Plus runs on a custom UI called Freedom OS from the company on top of Android 5.0.1 Lollipop. The Freedom OS is a customized version of Android with an app drawer but comes with the same notification center and settings panel.

The Swipe launcher offers a plethora of options to customize like any third-party launcher app available for Android.

The launcher comes with theming support where you can download additional themes. You can change the layouts, effects, size, color, status bar and more using the swipe customize option. There are n number of possibilities to customize the device and this is one of the strong points of the UI.

But having said that the company has included a lot of bloatware in the UI which is unnecessary. There is also a Swipe cleaner which can release unwanted memory from the device. While the UI offers lots of customization options, the amount of bloatware included is a major drawback and we even found ads on the phone. When we double tap on the home screen an ad was popping up and this weird nature on an Android phone.

Swipe needs to work on Freedom OS to make it clutter free.

Performance:

No phone is perfect in all aspects and this is where Swipe Elite Plus disappoints. The phone is powered by a 1.5Ghz Snapdragon 615 Octa-Core chipset coupled with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. The performance of the device with 2GB RAM was quite disappointing and we could see lag even on moderate usage. The swipe launcher showed lag when you switch between an app drawer and home screen. The performance of the device was not great comparing to the competition.

Heating was another major issue on the phone. With moderate usage, the temperature rose to anywhere between 43-45 degrees and with gaming it even touched 49 degrees. If you are a heavy user, Swipe Elite Plus is not a recommended device.

The phone comes with 16GB internal storage out of which 11.5GB is available to the user in the first boot. The device has 4G LTE and dual-SIM card support along with micro SD card. The call quality was quite good and so was the speaker performance.

Camera:

Swipe Elite Plus comes with a 13MP rear camera and 8MP front camera. Considering the price segment, this is good specs for the camera department. The camera interface of the Swipe Elite Plus is also quite good and offers a manual mode for capturing photos.

Talking about the photo quality, the 13MP camera has good colors and looks decent. But the sharpness levels are not impressive, but considering the price segment, this is acceptable. Some of the photos also exhibited hazy nature. The close up captures were impressive with good color reproduction. The front facing 8MP camera also worked very well. The video recording which is 1080p was just average. But overall, the camera on the Swipe Elite Plus is a performing one.

Battery Life:

The phone comes with a 3050mAh battery and the performance was quite good. With moderate usage which included calls, browsing, social networking, using the camera and casual gaming we could get around 3-4 hours of screen on time and it lasted a day.

Verdict:

Priced at Rs 6,999, Swipe Elite Plus is probably one of the few devices offering a Full HD display, good design and build and above average camera. But where the Swipe Elite Plus disappoints is the software and the performance. If you are looking for a good budget offering without much emphasis on performance, then Elite Plus is a good buy but if performance is your criteria we suggest you to look for Coolpad Note 3 Lite.