Wileyfox Storm review: A cheap phone that’s not so cheerful

Small-time British smartphone manufacturer Wileyfox is attempting the seemingly impossible. In a world where global giants Samsung and Sony are struggling to make money, it’s trying to chip out its own small niche, by offering low-cost, feature-packed phones in the mould of the OnePlus One and OnePlus 2. Its latest offering is the Wileyfox Storm.

It’s the firm’s second smartphone – the follow-up to the Wileyfox Swift, which as we noted in our review, wasn’t particularly swift – and, appropriately, it has far stronger innards and a larger, 5.5in screen. Despite that, it still isn’t all that pricey: you can get your hands on a Storm today for £200, and you don’t have to gain an exclusive invite to buy one either.

The question is: is it worth even that modest price?

Wileyfox Storm review: Design

From the front, the Wileyfox Storm resembles a cross between the LG G3 and the Nexus 4. The handset is dominated by its 5.5in screen, and although it’s quite angular for the most part, the top and bottom ends of the handset have a gentle curve to them. It isn’t a bad look by any means, but it is pretty non-descript. One minor deviation on the front is an LED flash to go with the front-facing camera. It’s intended to alleviate the graininess of low-light selfies, but it’s distracting: a small circle of white and yellow in an otherwise clean, black frontage.

Flipping the Storm over reveals a more distinct design. The back is finished in “sandstone black” – black and speckled, in other words. It’s constructed from soft plastic, and has a felt-like texture that feels odd, but offers enough grip that you never feel in danger of dropping it, despite its size.

In the centre of the back is a plastic embossed logo of a fox, which isn’t a million miles away from the distinctive alien head on Alienware laptops. Unlike the Wileyfox Swift, the backplate isn’t removable, which is a slightly odd oversight, given it isn’t a metal unibody design. The home button glows when you have a message, which is a nice understated touch, though.

In short, the Wileyfox Storm is a smart enough, mid-range handset, but it’s no flagship design to rival the likes of LG, Samsung and Apple.

Wileyfox Storm review: Specifications and performance

So what do you get for the extra £70 or so that the Storm costs over the Swift? A fair bit, as it turns out. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor runs the show, backed with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage, plus support for 128GB microSD cards should that prove insufficient. If that wasn’t enough, the Storm also supports dual SIM cards, although, as you might expect at this price, there’s no room for a fingerprint reader or NFC.

This is reasonably promising. The Snapdragon 615 is found in a number of handsets, the most famous being the Motorola Moto X Play, which scored a quite respectable four stars when we reviewed it earlier in the year. Certainly, barring a baffling slow down during initial startup, the Wileyfox Storm runs smoothly and copes admirably with the day-to-day tasks of browsing the web, tweeting and general smartphone duties.

What about in our benchmarks? Well, here’s how it compares to other notable handsets in its price and spec bracket:

This is a marked improvement over the budget Wileyfox Swift, and safely justifies the extra £70. It’s also pretty similar to the Motorola Moto X Play, a handset that costs £50 more at the time of writing. The only fly in the ointment is the Samsung Galaxy S4 – yes, the S4 – which was the closest in numbers I could find in the entire chart. Suffice it to say that battling for stats with the flagship of 2013 isn’t a good place to be as we approach the start of 2016.

How about graphics-focused benchmarks? The same handsets slug it out again in the table below:

More of the same here: expect no world-beater with the latest 3D games at high detail levels, but simple 2D titles? It should cope with those fine.

Wileyfox Storm review: Screen and battery life

The Wileyfox Storm packs a screen built by Korean electronics giant LG: an IPS 1080p screen, with a pixel density of 400ppi. Despite decent viewing angles and a reasonable heritage, the quality isn’t great.

Our screen tests revealed that the panel covered just 86.7% of the sRGB colour spectrum, and a relatively low contrast of 754:1. The screen doesn’t even go all that bright, with our tests revealing a maximum brightness of only 380cd/m2. That’s significantly dimmer than the panel on the Wileyfox Swift, which managed 552cd/m2.

Despite the dark screen, battery life was similarly unimpressive. In our tests, the Wileyfox Storm lasted a mere 7hrs 54mins before running dry. That’s around an hour worse than the Wileyfox Swift, which was bad enough, but at least you can change the battery on that phone – you can’t here.

From my day-to-day experience with the Storm I can say that this result is entirely fair: you can get through a day – sometimes – but I wouldn’t count on it. All else being equal, the battery life is lousy.

Wileyfox Storm review: CyanogenMod

So far, this phone hasn’t impressed me. One saving grace, though, is its operating system. CyanogenMod is one of the most respected community-backed Android ROMs around, but typically the only way to get it on to your phone is to root it and void the warranty. That’s not a problem for Wileyfox’s phones – you get CyanogenMod right out of the box, and all the benefits that brings.

What are those benefits? The team behind it says it’s highly optimised and free of bloatware. That’s a good start, but another is that it’s as clean, modern and easy to use as the stock Android you get on a Nexus device.

And, as we wrote in our Wileyfox Swift review, CyanogenMod is a genuinely strong selling point, with dozens of neat features ranging from musical tweaks for the audiophile to customisable themes to transform the way Android looks and behaves. For those who want to tinker, CyanogenMod is tough to beat.

Out of the box, though, it’ll be familiar enough for anyone who has used Android before to be well within their comfort zone, with a few nice extra touches. It comes unencumbered with apps you’ll want to delete right away, so for the software, it’s hard to give Wileyfox anything but a full-blooded thumbs up.

Wileyfox Storm review: Camera

While LG is responsible for the screen tech, Wileyfox claims on its website that it sought out Sony for its camera technology, but the 20-megapixel rear camera on the Wileyfox Storm feels a good couple of leagues below the tech you find in Sony’s flagship Z5 range.

There’s a noticeable delay between the camera app starting and the camera focussing – a good couple of seconds – and when you finally take the picture, zooming in reveals a good degree of noise, even in quite well lit settings. In low light, it copes worse, as most mobile cameras do, but from a weaker starting position. The Storm’s snapper is nothing to write home about.

The front-facing selfie camera, on the other hand, works well, if you like that sort of thing. It’s an eight megapixel camera, and as previously mentioned, it’s accompanied by a single LED flash, so selfies are surprisingly decent in any conditions. It’s no substitute for a quality main camera, though.

Wileyfox Storm review: Verdict

The Wileyfox Storm is a great example of why it’s worth approaching manufacturers’ specifications sheets with a little scepticism. On paper, it looks like a real bargain, but one-by-one, the lofty promises tumble, and what originally seemed “too good to be true” for the price, turn out to be merely “fair enough”.

That isn’t to say the Wileyfox Storm is a bad phone. It plainly isn’t, and performance-wise it’s up there with the Motorola X Play, which retails for £50 more. At the same time, however, battery life is disappointing and the camera is poor.

If you want a phone with CyanogenMod without breaking warranty, this is a much stronger proposition than the Wileyfox Swift, and worth the extra £70 premium. The company clearly has a bright future, and if the next handset it releases improves things once more, we might just have a handset to recommend. The Storm, however, isn’t quite there just yet.

See also: Our pick of the best smartphones for 2016