Ever since the Moto E, Moto G and subsequently the ASUS Zen series hit the market, there has been a big flood of cheap and useful phones that have arrived. There are a lot of phone makers trying to cashing in on this trend. Swipe has entered this segment with the Konnect 5.0 in the under 10k category in India. Does this phone cut it? We checked it out and here are our observations about this phone.
The phone looks decent. The removable back side is curved, slightly inspired by the Moto E we felt. Holding it in the hand is comfortable. The size is overall large, but it does not feel chunky. At the back is an 8 Megapixel rear camera. The camera slightly protrudes out of the back side, there is a chrome ring surrounding the camera. Makes it look slightly ugly compared to its contemporaries. It also has an LED flash near the lens. The speakers are at the bottom side.
The power button is on the right, the volume rocker is on the left. The micro-USB point and the 3.5mm audio jack are at the top. Once you remove the back panel, you see the SIM slots, microSD slot and the removable battery. Please note that removing the back panel is easy, putting it back on is very tough, the locking points don’t snap in easily. This is messy.
The phone uses predominantly plastic and hence does not feel premium, just the curved edges feel professional and premium. If we have to compare this phone with Moto E, Asus Zenfone 5, we will be disappointed. It feels cheap and looks cheap too! I think Swipe has to improve there if they want to make an impact and have market share in this segment.
The Konnect 5.0 has a 5-inch IPS display with qHD (960×540 pixels) resolution, a pixel density of 220ppi and rather broad bezels around it. The display does a decent job at reproducing colors, text is readable , and so are viewing angles and readability under direct sunlight. But there is a very noticeable lack in sharpness. The display is also prone to scratches and fingerprints, and in order to save it from the former it is advisable to use the flip cover bundled with the device. It was thoughtful of Swipe to bundle the cover with the device, otherwise, we don’t see the display lasting long.
The smartphone features an 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, supplemented with a 3.2-megapixel front-facing camera. The primary camera clicks just about decent shots under ideal lighting conditions, but the colors lack punch. Indoors and under low light conditions, there is a lot of noise, which not even the camera’s Night Mode is able to rectify. Things are much the same at the front too, and the 3.2-megapixel snapper is just about average for clicking selfies and video chatting. Nothing remarkable. In fact, we felt let down by the lack of innovation or value addition in the camera.
The OS at launch was Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, but since then Swipe has pushed Kit Kat update OTA to the devices and the new ones are shipping with Kit Kat, but here also the point worth noting is that Swipe has not bothered with UI customization and gone with a largely stock approach, good but shows lack of innovative thought from the manufacturer. When look at the Zen UI and the recent MIUI, you will understand what we mean. Again, looks like Swipe did not put in effort there. Novelty is the name of the game and Swipe seems to be on the lower side there.
The phone is powered by a MediaTek quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz and paired with 1GB of RAM. This ensures largely smooth performance and we rarely experienced any lags or jerks even when multitasking. The processor however comes under some level of stress when playing graphic intensive games like Riptide GP2. Even Candy Crush Saga was lagging a lot after initially running smooth for some time. We were disappointed here also.
The Konnect 5.0 comes with 8GB of internal storage, of which around 4.52GB is available for users. Thee are a lot of apps that are pre-installed. As a saving grace, there is a microSD card slot which you can use to expand the storage to up to 32GB. Pretty ordinary!
The battery is a big disappointment, today’s users are very intensive and rarely offline. The meagre 1,950mAh battery was not able to last an entire day. On heavy usage — involving push notifications from multiple email accounts, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, about 20 minutes of gaming, and another 20 minutes of calling and messaging — the battery was able to last for about eight hours. When we brought down the usage, we could add another couple of hours to battery life. Extremely unsatisfactory and disadvantageous in today’s scenario!
Here are some benchmarks we did with it.
To conclude the review, we can say that Swipe Konnect 5.0 is an ok or decent smartphone, but an ok smartphone does not ring well with today’s market where prices are coming down and features are going up. The build is poor, cheap material and very poor battery life. It will face tough competition in the budget phone segment that is currently heating up with the entry of many wonderful devices that are pushing the limit. Hope to see a better phone from Swipe soon.