The affordable 4G handsets are growing fas, with LTE going mainstream. Domestic Smartphone brand, Swipe Telecom is the latest to pitch in with Swipe Elite 2 4G. Last month, they announced a new online only sub-brand, Elite and the first Elite model was a 3G device. The Elite 2 is an upgrade in terms of the LTE addition but downgrade in terms of specifications. It also managed to be cheaper than the first Elite and is priced at Rs 4,666.
So the Swipe Elite 4G is a compact phone at a compact price. It has a 4.5-inch display with a 960 x 540 pixels resolution. Recently, Lenovo A2010 and Yu Yunique has launched handsets at this price band with HD resolution and it might wean away some people at the first onset. Having said that, the display of Elite 2 4G does not disappoint either.
The display is bright with an adaptive bright feature, which I found was not very effective though. There is no auto brightness and we have to manually set the desired brightness. There is no Corning Gorilla but Swipe has spared the pain of applying a screen guard by pre-laying the film out of the box.
The rear looks more presentable now shedding the loud Swipe logo that was seen in the first model of Elite. It skin feels good. The bottom has the speaker grille and the Elite branding on top of it.
The 8MP rear camera module is prominently raised with the LED flash beneath it. A raised design increases the risk of the camera being scratched or damaged when kept flat on the surface.
The power and volume controls are positioned to the right offering a good tactile feedback, the bottom has just a microphone. On the top, you find the audio jack and the microUSB port on the either corners. The three capacitive buttons on the front are not backlit. The front also houses a 5MP selfie camera, earpiece grill and few sensors.
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I don’t remember when I saw last a white-color battery pack but Swipe Elite 2, houses one. It’s a 1900mAh capacity brick. Also there is a dual-SIM slots and a microSD card slot.
While the phone runs on Android 5.1 lollipop, Swipe has put a huge effort into its Freedom OS 1.1 UI and thinks that would differentiate this phone from the rest of the pack and also impresses upon as with its array of customization options.
Long pressing the blank area in the screen or the menu button opens up the menu with customization options. There is a swipe customization and swipe launcher settings. The swipe customization gives granular access to personalize app drawer (you can even have your own picture in stead of the dots at the app drawer icon) , effects, layout, size of the icons, label colors as well as an option to do away with the labels, status bar and notifications etc. Swipe launcher settings has more than half a dozen of gesture actions to call various apps or tasks. And if you don’t like the Swipe launcher, you can shift to standard lollipop launcher. The notification panel again gets an additional bar of swipe launcher task icons. In short, the Freedom OS has exhaustive list of features and it can drive you crazy.
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The Swipe Elite 2 is powered by 1.3 GHz MediaTek MT6735 Quad Core Processor and 1GB of RAM. It is a clamp down from the first Elite which had 2GB of RAM. It reflects on the performance. The device lags at certain tasks. The graphic is also not adequate for graphic intensive gaming. I might be bit harsh on the Swipe but Yunique has raised the bar in this segment. I suspect the bloatware to be the cause and also a 2GB of RAM could have given it more room. Out of the 8GB of internal storage, you barely get 4GB user available. Many people also complained of WiFi connectivity issues but I never faced any such instances. The speaker is loud and the call quality is decent too.
Ob board is a 8MP rear camera with LED flash and a 5MP selfie camera. For it’s price, I was happy with the camera performance. The color reproduction was better but zooming in the images, shows you the noise levels especially the indoor and low light pictures. It can get its work done for you casual clicks and shares.
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A 1900mAh battery might look underwhelming compared to what we hear these days but the Elite 4G has a compact display, and modest specs. The battery is adequate for what is under the hood of the phone and it can pass through a day on modest use.
Final word
What I liked
- Affordable LTE device
- Freedom OS for those who like to customize.
- decent camera
What I didn’t like
- Bloatware
- 2GB could have given that extra room for performance.
