Swipe 3D Life Tab X74 Review

With a growing amount of Android tablets in the Indian market, it is no surprise now that new manufacturers are seen popping up every now and then with a new range of these 7-inch devices. Almost all are seen with similar hardware specs and features, but just differ in operating system versions and build quality. Similar is the case with California-based Swipe Telecom which entered the Indian market a few months ago with three variants of 7-inch tablets. All three feature similar specifications in terms of hardware, but are slightly different from each other. We have had our hands on the Swipe 3D Life Tab X74 and here is what we found out about the tablet.

7-inch display but a regular TFT screen—not 3D

Design and build
The tablet has a very good build quality and looks great because of its rounded edges and glossy shell. But the high-gloss won’t last long and will tend to tarnish in no time. The front features three capacitive buttons for Home, Back and Menu, but we noticed the icon for the home button is either misprinted or deliberately marked with four boxes which usually denote the app drawer. Towards the top right is a small status LED which illuminates green for use and red for charge. We did note that this LED turns red whilst charging, which is normal, but remains continuously lit in green even if the device is in use or in standby mode and only turns off when you power off the tablet. This phenomenon can actually drain the battery to quite an extent when in standby mode.

Glossy white back with a 3D logo - a Gimmic

 
The right side features all the connectivity ports such as power, audio out and PC USB interface. Unlike other tablets, this one does not feature an HDMI port using which one can enjoy media on a large screen TV. The volume rocker and power buttons are seen on the top towards the right, but though highly tactile, they are not raised sufficiently for speedy operations. The rear features the microSD card slot and a single window for a mono speaker. The rear panel is a bright glossy white panel marked with a large company logo and a 3D sticker.

No HDMI port

Features and performance
The x74 3D is built using a Boxchip A13 processor clocked at 1.5GHz and is coupled with 512MB of RAM. The display is a 7-inch 5-finger multi-touch TFT screen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. An internal storage of 4GB is provided for storing apps and data, but you can expand this capacity up to 32GB via the microSD card slot. The operating system installed is Android 4.0.3 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich). The device is pretty small, has a thickness of 10.5 mm and weighs around 325 grams.

Swipe boasts about this tablet being the country’s first 3D tablet which we see as just a marketing stunt or a gimmick. The display is a standard TFT display, which is similar to any regular mobile phone, tablet, monitor or television set. The 3D offered by this tablet is nothing but anaglyph photos and videos which can be viewed with the pair of red and cyan glasses that is bundled for free. When one views an anaglyph photo or video with any red and cyan glasses, the image generated is 3D. This “3D” can be viewed on any display screen including CRT monitors, televisions or projectors and can also be printed on a sheet of paper using a standard printer. In short, this tablet does not feature a 3D display screen, but simply bundles red and cyan glasses with the product for one to watch anaglyph 3D content on it.

Simple 3D Anaglyph videos and photos are loaded

We did our usual tests to benchmark the tablet to gauge its overall performance and here are the scores. Linpack spewed a single-thread score of 5 MFLOPS and a multi-thread score of 7.2 MFLOPS. Quadrant and AnTuTu displayed scores of 1346 and 2718 respectively. If there was a GPU added, we definitely would have seen much higher performances, but since there isn’t any, the scores are just around average when compared to a similar product in its category. To sum up the performance, this tablet does not perform any better than any other 7-inch Chinese tablet available in the market.