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Battery life
- 2,700mAh battery just about gets through a day
- Quick Charge 3.0 via a reversible USB Type-C connection
There's a 2,700mAh battery beating inside the Swift 2 which has enough stamina to get you through a typical day of modern usage, but only just.
The phone supports Quick Charge 3.0 via its reversible USB Type-C connection, which means you can fully charge the battery in under an hour, or top it up quite dramatically with short-burst charges.
In our battery test – where we run a HD video at full screen brightness with the volume at maximum for 90 minutes – the Swift 2 shed 32% of its battery life. The similarly priced Moto G5 lost just 22% and the slightly pricier Wileyfox Swift 2 X lost 27%.
That's quite a lot of power gone in a short space of time then, so don't expect the Swift 2 to be the kind of phone you can avoid charging each night. Android's built-in battery saver helps prolong each charge by limiting certain features and functions, but you won't want to rely on that totally.
Camera
- 13MP rear-facing camera, 8MP front-facing camera
- Poor low light performance
It's a bit of an odd time for smartphone cameras. A few years back the common belief was that the higher the megapixel count the better, but recently we've seen handset makers change their strategy somewhat; instead of ramping up the pixels they've focused (no pun intended) on giving their phones larger sensors which work better in low-light situations.
This has made it harder to differentiate the good eggs from the bad ones, and while the Swift 2 certainly isn't in the latter camp, it's not the best smartphone snapper we've seen.
The Swift 2 is equipped with a Samsung-made 13MP sensor that boasts Phase Detection Autofocus.
In optimal conditions this means super-fast focus and image capture, and we were constantly surprised at how fast the phone was able to snap a shot from a standing start, as long as the scene was well-lit.
The quality of the images is a little washed out, but the high megapixel count does at last mean they're rich with detail. So far, so good.
Where the Swift 2 really falls down is low light shooting – an area in which many leading phones are really starting to take big strides. If you're in an environment where lighting is uneven or dim, that Samsung sensor begins to struggle.
Focus time is drastically increased as the sensor tries to read the scene, and even the slightest movement causes the resultant image to blur quite badly.
