Wileyfox Storm review

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, 1,920×1,080 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.

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. 

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 Moto G4. If you’re determined to keep costs down below £200, then the Moto G4 is by far the better choice.