WileyFox Storm review

It's only been a few months since WileyFox launched its first UK handset, but now this new British smartphone company is back with a second model; the WileyFox Storm. Just as the WileyFox Swift took aim at Motorola's 3rd Gen Moto G, so the Storm has its sights set on Motorola's £279 Moto X Play, as its octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 20-megapixel camera and large, 5.5in Full HD screen give it a nigh-on identical specification to Motorola's mid-range champion.

The key difference, though, is that the Storm only costs £199, making it £80 cheaper than the Moto X Play. That's a significant saving if you're looking to get a great mid-range smartphone without breaking the bank, although the WileyFox Storm also faces stiff competition from the £180 Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, which uses the same processor but only has a 13-megapixel camera.

The Storm's design won't be for everyone. While it feels extremely well-made and its textured, soft-touch rear feels great in the hand, the orange WileyFox branding and embossed plastic logo on the back are a little gaudy compared to the plainer, more subtle designs of its nearest rivals. Still, if you can look past the surface details, the Storm is a very tempting prospect.

Cyanogen OS and features

A big part of its appeal is the Cyanogen 12.1 custom operating system. It looks just like stock Android, but adds a number of useful extras, helping to improve security and overall practicality. For instance, Cyanogen lets you alter individual app permissions, giving you greater control over what information your apps are able to access. If you don't want Dropbox accessing your contacts, you can simply switch off this permission while still being able to use the service. Admittedly, this is becoming less of a selling point now that Android 6.0 Marshmallow does essentially the same thing, but with phone manufacturers dragging their heels over their respective Marshmallow rollouts, it's still reassuring that WileyFox offers this feature straight out of the box. Truecaller's caller ID and spam filter are also built straight into the dialler, helping to cut down on irritating nuisance calls. 

^ With Cyanogen 12.1, you can customise the appearance of your phone right down to app icons and fonts

Cyanogen is also more customisable than stock Android. As well as hundreds of different themes to download from WileyFox's Theme app, you can personalise your OS down to every last detail, from the wallpaper and icon design right through to the boot animation and font. It's not too dissimilar from HTC's Sense 7 interface, which comes pre-installed on handsets such as the HTC Desire 626, but it's still unusual to have this amount of control over your phone's appearance at this end of the price market.

Performance

Cyanogen flies with an octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chip behind it, especially when the Storm has a generous 3GB of RAM at its disposal, too. In GeekBench 3, its scores of 663 in the single core test and 2,380 in the multicore test put it neck and neck with the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua and Moto X Play, and its score of 343 frames (or 5.5fps) in GFX Bench GL's offscreen Manhattan test gives it plenty of power for playing games. It still stumbled slightly when playing Hearthstone, but other games such as Threes and Alphabear ran perfectly smoothly.

The Storm's web browsing performance was equally fluid, even if its Peacekeeper score of 777 lagged a little behind the 800+ scores of the Moto X Play and Xperia M4 Aqua. Web pages loaded quickly with smooth scrolling throughout, and I hardly saw any signs of stutter at all when browsing articles on the Guardian.

Display

While the Storm's performance give it a serious leg up over the Moto X Play, it ends up falling into the same pitfalls as its little brother. Like the Swift, it's clear that WileyFox has had to make some compromises to get the Storm's price down this low, and the main casualty is its 5.5in, 1,920x1,080 resolution display.

It might be just as sharp as the Moto X Play, but colour accuracy is decidedly below average for an IPS display, covering just 86.7% of the sRGB colour gamut. Its main area of weakness was its warm colour reproduction, resulting in rather washed-out reds and unnaturally orange whites and blacks, but it doesn't help that the screen's black levels of 0.50cd/m2 aren't particularly deep to begin with.

Contrast is also on the low side with a contrast ratio of 754:1, and the screen's rather underwhelming maximum brightness level of 379.91cd/m2 prevents images from really jumping out of the screen. The screen tended to become a bit of a fingerprint magnet as well, making it even more difficult to use in bright lighting conditions.

Battery Life

The Storm lacks the stamina of its main rivals, as its 2,500mAh battery lasted just 7h 54m in our continuous video playback test with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2. This is over five hours behind the Moto X Play, and three hours behind the Xperia M4 Aqua, making it one of the least enduring phones I've tested this year. 

Camera

The Storm's 20-megapixel camera was also something of a disappointment. Despite its large resolution, photos were very overprocessed when viewed at full resolution and contrast levels suffered greatly. Colours were largely accurate, but light buildings lost almost all sense of detail while shadow areas were riddled with gritty patches of pixels. Some buildings weren't even in focus, particularly toward the edge of the frame, and there's no HDR support either, so you'll have to make do with its standard exposure levels.

^ Colours look good on the Storm's camera, but detail is severely lacking

The camera wasn't much better indoors either, as every single object in our still life arrangement had very soft, fuzzy outlines, even when we had our external lamp turned on. The fur on our teddy bear was particularly hazy, and the stems in our flower vase were full of artefacts and jagged edges. As a result, this is a camera that's only really suited to social media uploads, as the quality simply isn't good enough to have as your main camera. 

^ Even in bright indoor light conditions, the Storm struggled to focus on any object in our still life arrangement

Conclusion

The WileyFox Storm's flaws outweigh its advantages. It might be fast with a customisable operating system, but its display, battery life and camera are no match for the Moto X Play, or indeed the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. I'd much rather spend the extra for the Moto X Play, but if you're determined to keep costs down below £200, then the Xperia M4 Aqua is by far the better choice.