Swipe Fablet F1 Review

Budget Android-based smartphones seem to be spilling over in the market and most manufacturers are targeting larger screens and higher processor specifications. Swipe, a known manufacturer of Android tablets, has also come up with a large screen phone for the budget hunters—the Fablet F1. Read on to find out how this product fares.

Design and build quality 

The Fablet F1 is a 5-inch Android-based smartphone and resembles the Samsung Galaxy Note to some extent. The Fablet is a tad too heavy and the body is a bit on the bulkier side. The product is entirely black in colour with a dark chrome lining around the sides. The rear panel is matte-finished. The front features the large 5-inch LCD display panel along with a single physical Home button.The Menu and Back buttons are capacitive backlit and placed on either side of the Home button. Towards the top is a front facing camera for video chats.

The volume rocker on the left, audio and micro USB interface on the top

The left side sports the volume rocker while the right side features the power/standby button. The micro USB PC interface and earphone jack are placed on the top. The rear panel sports the main shooter with an LED flash just placed below it. Also seen below is a speaker grille. The entire chassis is very tough and firm. Opening the rear panel is a bit tricky and one can end up damaging the notches that clamp the panel to the phone. Bundled along with the Fablet F1 is a charger, a micro USB cable and a pair of white glossy ear buds. The LCD is pre-equipped with a screen guard, which will save you the cost and trouble of hunting for one later. The F1 measures 11.4 mm in thickness and stands 145 mm tall with a width of 80 mm wide; it weighs around 216 g.

5 MP rear shooter with LED flash, matte-finished back panel

Features

The Fablet F1 is powered by a single core 1GHz Scorpion processor clubbed along with 512MB of RAM. A PowerVR SGX 531 processor supports the graphics section for related performance needs. The display is a large 5-inch capacitive LCD panel sporting a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The internal storage stays at 4GB while this can be expanded up to 32GB using a microSD card. The memory card slot is hot swappable, making it easier to exchange storage cards without switching off the phone. The F1 is a dual SIM GSM phone with one slot supporting WCDMA too. The main shooter on the rear is 5MP with an LED flash while the front camera has a simple VGA resolution good enough for video chats. On the connectivity front, the F1 is equipped with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and a micro USB 2.0 interface for the PC. Also included is support for 3G, 2G and GPS. The phone runs on Android ICS v4.0 operating system with loads of free apps pre-installed. These range from regular office documentation to casual free games and entertainment apps. Apart from these, the manufacturer has included 72 apps in .apk form and placed the pack on the internal storage for the user to install if needed. 

The F1 runs on a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM and ICS OS

Performance

We tested the phone to know how it performs using a few benchmarking utilities as usual. AnTuTu scored 4890, Quadrant scored 2635 and NenaMark2 gave us a frame rate of 23.5 fps. Linpack scored 40.99 in single-thread tests and 35.19 in multi-thread tests. Looking at the results from the benchmarking scores and matching them up to similar spec phones such as the Wammy Note or the iBall Andi 5C, the F1 performs almost 10 percent faster. The reason could be the different graphics processor coupled with some tweaks in the operating system.

User interface

The F1 is pre-installed with the free version of GO Launcher. The user has a choice to switch between the third-party user interface or the stock one during the initial setup or later using the control panel. The user interface is not as smooth as one would expect, but since this phone runs on a single-core processor, we don’t think one should complain. Though the user interface tends to slow down a bit and become laggy or sluggish at times, the overall user experience is not bad. Removing unwanted applications and replacing the GO Launcher with a lighter alternative would definitely help the phone perform well.  

Dual SIM GSM with one slot supporting WCDMA, hot swappable micro SD card slot