Swipe Konnect 5.0 Review: A Smartphone For the beginners That Still Needs Work

Rating:

3.5/5

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PROS

• Decent Processing Power
• More Internal Storage
• Fast Camera UI

CONS

• Drains Battery Life
• Pre-loaded Apps
• Failure to capture True Colors

Compared to what it was even a few years ago, the Indian mobile phone market has grown and evolved. And although it goes without saying that the market still operated in those times with players such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson taking the main initiative, there was hardly any involvement from native mobile phone makers.

The time we are talking about is back when nobody knew what a smartphone was. That was the age of feature phones where Nokia's Symbian OS offering ruled the charts, and was considered to be one of the most advanced piece of mobile OS at that time.

However, times change. And so does the nature of the market. We have come a long way from feature phones and right now the current generation knows only about smartphones. A smartphone can do almost anything that possible via your phone: something a feature phone never even thought about.

Keeping the big name brands at bay for the time being, let's take this opportunity to discuss more about the native makers. Companies like Micromax, Karbonn and others come under this segment, with more and more arriving almost everyday. And one such name is Swipe with its new Konnect 5.0 handset.

The Swipe Konnect 5.0 has been released in black and white color options, with the company is also offering a free screen guard, flip cover and premium business navigator worth Rs.1,499 with the handset. Moreover, the company is also said to release 10 new devices in India in the same Konnect series by next quarter.

The Konnect 5.0 is yet another example where a handset is looking to compete against other major names in the budget segment of the market. And it also joins a long line of such makers who never expected an MNC like Motorola to take the budget section by storm with the release of the Moto E.

But what does the Swipe Konnect 5.0 bring to the table that others don't? Is it a worthy challenger to the many others in the same category? We recently got a chance to play around with the device and check out its several aspects and features. Let's take a look at a review for it.

Swipe Konnect 5.0 Review: Form Factor and Operating System

As far as numbers and stats are concerned, the Swipe Konnect 5.0 comes with a 5-inch (960 ×540 pixels) qHD capacitive touch screen IPS display. However, going deep into the device, very honestly, there's nothing really in terms of designing. In fact, it's not really the best design that you would ever see.

Be it a budget offering or a high end handset, designing remains one of the key factors that still determines the financial potential of a handset. Examples could be drawn from the likes of Motorola Moto E and Lava Iris X1 who are offering not only a budget offering, but also making sure that it also stays asthetically designed.

However, the phone still has a sort of unique design to its name as it sports curved corners and a curved back. The 5-inch IPS display of the device with a pixel resolution of 960x540 has a pixel density of 220 PPI. Also, the brightness levels of the device are somewhat decent.

While the screen is bright enough for our liking, the main thing that actually concerned us if that brightness get affected anyway when exposed to direct sunlight. But what we found out actually impressed us. Not only did the device maintain its brilliant viewing angles, but it showcased good sunlight legibility. However, work was needed on making the screen sharper.

Moreover, the screen of the device isn't really resistant to scratches since it doesn't have a scratch resistant glass to protect it. However, you can still use the bundled flip covers in order to protect the display from scratches.

Also, the device display can be termed glossy, and hence it attracts a lot of fingerprints. Again going by the numbers, the smartphone is 148mm tall, which is a bit taller than most of the 5-inch smartphones in the market. And that's mainly due to its huge bezel offering.

As expected, there are the usual capacitive touch buttons for menu, home and back, placed below the display. And all these are backlit while offering haptic feedback. Notably, even though the smartphone doesnt offer a LED notification light, the touch buttons blink when notifications are received.

The phone itself comes running on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) with the similar kind of stock UI that you get to see so predominantly with other devices under the same Media-Tek banner. And although and Android KitKat version 4.4 update was promised for the device, we are yet to receive any such update for the handset.