Making a splash in a well-established, some may say entrenched, mobile market isn’t an easy proposition.
At the top end of the scale you have companies like Samsung, Apple, HTC, Motorola and other household brands to contend with, while at the ‘value’ end of the scale you get challenger brands like One-plus, Oppo and Huawei.
To make its first two devices — the Wileyfox Swift and Storm — stand out from the rest of the crowd, both use the Android 5.1-based Cyanogen OS 12.1 platform, which is a smart move when you’re competing against a sea of mid-range Android handsets.
If you’ve not used the Cyanogen OS before but are familiar with Android, you’ll be just fine. Anyone moving across from other smartphone operating systems (or indeed, upgrading from a non-smartphone) will need to take a little time to familiarize, but there’s nothing unexpected to trip you up.
If you don’t have a Cyanogen account, you’ll need to set one up if you want to do things like personalize the theme you’re using.
There’s a theme editor too, so if you like the general appearance but want to modify one particular aspect of it, you can do that too.
It’s also easy to quickly switch between different user profiles or to swap into a guest account if someone needs to borrow your phone. There are additional privacy features that allow you to lock down which apps are accessible, which is handy for parents or anyone that often shares a handset.
In our quick test, the camera seems to take a photo quickly, with minimal lag between pressing the shutter and the image being captured, but there’s one caveat: it does take a little while for the autofocus to catch up if you’ve been moving the handset around a lot before taking a photo.
From the images above, the camera seems to be plenty sharp and keep colors realistic, rather than overblown, but the burst mode image above (of the bench) does have a blue-ish hue that wasn’t present in real-life. At this point, I’d assume that to be the fault of the burst mode capture method rather than a general issue for the camera, as the other images don’t suffer from the same problem.
In reality, this isn’t a huge problem for things like looking at images or videos, though you might notice it in things like browser text if you’re used to a higher-resolution display. The Storm’s larger, higher-res screen didn’t have the same problem, but then it does come with a slightly higher price tag at £199, rather than £129.
