last step of the journey
Soon to sell out to a big american firm and disappear from the light as your product gets smothered as it's good competition :(
Last year a new London phone startup launched to try and tame the Shenzhen tiger. WileyFox aimed to harness the Chinese manufacturing revolution that's brought us low-cost Androids to a decent brand with local support. WileyFox sold a respectable amount – half a million devices – without becoming a household name. But that was a …
Like Sendo?
I think that for the most part those days have gone. WileyFox aren't big enough to be that much of a threat or an opportunity, the brand is very niche (and loses its "crafty British challenger" appeal as soon as acquired by a bumbling incumbent), and what are WFx doing that the majors could do but choose not to?
Surely the only people this would make sense for would be Cyanogenmod themselves, since they're making no money from their software at the moment, and they might see WileyFox either as their main route to market, or as their "reference" design in the manner of the Nexus devices. But as a US company I'd have thought there's a range of US-based Shenzen-vetters who are doing the same sort of thing as WFx, and CM would culturally be a better fit with another US business.
The other thing is that whilst we often bemoan the sale of UK start ups, what those sales actually reflect is the sense of proportion of UK entrepreneurs. Why put the years of extra work in, and take the risks to build a half-a-billion pound corporate business, if you can sell out much earlier for £15m, and either retire somewhere pleasant, or start again in the rule-free world of the start-up? Building a big corporate enterprise (successfully) would make them very rich indeed, but it means moving from anarchic energy and innovation to a world of process, compliance, policies, board meetings, corporate finance, suits and PHBs. And to get the benefits, you've still got to go through a hair-raising trade sale, or worse still an IPO, where you'll initially be a key man, but then be squeezed out of "your own" company by the suits.
The theory being that in the US after you have made your 'million' (i.e. about 10 million, don't want to be one of the poor 'single digit millionaires') you think 'how can I make my billion' whereas in the UK you buy the Old Rectory in some bucolic village, get a few non-executive directorships, dabble half hardheartedly in another start up etc.
Frankly I would rather have the old rectory than a company full of nasty whiny people etc. with the danger any day one might be shafted by whatever platform one is build on / have another start up eat our lunch etc. so who can blame them?
Our dream is just to get out with enough cash to stop worrying, rather than to crush the world beneath our bootheels.
Far better than being Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Turdoch or their ilk. Everyday motivated by greed for more, envy of anybody richer than them, angry at each percieved slight, or the inadequacy of the army of wage slaves and sycophants around them. Working all hours of their life to be richer and yet richer. And then, when the funeral's over and the "mourners" have dispersed, their families can tear themselves apart over the loot.
Unless they find a way to take it all with them.
My parents had a stroke of pure luck in the timing of their last move and just about managed to scrape enough for a (genuine) Old Rectory in a rural location, back in the 80s. My Dad, genius bargain hunter that he is, discovered that a survey was optional on buildings over a century old so decided to save himself a few hundred quid... it's not so much a money PIT, as a money mineshaft. You could fill in a pit if you had a lorryload of cash. This... you'd need to pull it down and rebuild it, brick by brick, to get much in the way of practicality out of it. You could start by digging some actual foundations -- the 18" thick masonry walls literally rest on beaten earth. All three floors of them. And cold /damp? Listen, you don't know cold until you've had to clear the ice off of the inside of your bedroom windows in the morning...
Ha, yes my partner's Dad had a similarly exciting house. The highlight was the insurance loss adjuster coming to look at something for an insurance claim failing to put the car brake on sufficiently so the car rolled down and then off the steep and twisty drive, demolishing a wall.
"...That was normal in the 1950s and even later..."
Yep normal for me too in the 80's
We moved into a stone built house with the same 18" thick walls and single glazed windows.
Mornings were...fresh :)
Once we eventually got double glazing it was blissfully warm by comparison.
And cold /damp? Listen, you don't know cold until you've had to clear the ice off of the inside of your bedroom windows in the morning...
Every house in the UK used to have to scrape ice off the inside of windows - that's what hot pennies were for - kids today......
WileyFox was aiming for sub-£150 but got hit by the fall in sterling. That should help exports, though, and WileyFox has strong plans for Europe.
If the price was hit by the fall in the value of the pound then it is obviously dominated by the price of imports. The export price will also be dominated by the price of the inputs and is likely to be unchanged. What will change is the value of exports in GBP.
but then I think Apple phones are barely American, though they do more designing than WileyFox
They (Merkins) do more designing? On the silicon front maybe, but what country are ARM and CSR based in? And on the aesthetics, are you suggesting that Jonny Ive has traded his UK passport for a Yank one?
Cyanogen OS was the commercial version of CyanogenMod. They could flip to the community version which is essentially the same without the QA. I'm sure they could do QA in-house or pay some devs to do the same.
It is incredible that Cyanogen's commercial efforts flopped so badly. They were a shoe-in for producing firmware, QA and after-market support for phone makers who didn't want to do it themselves.
It is incredible that Cyanogen's commercial efforts flopped so badly
Wasn't it suggested here in ElReg a while ago that Google had been tightening the screws on manufacturers - something along the lines of "use 100% or 0% Google - your choice" ?
And isn't that more or less one of the things Microsoft got hammered for in the past ?
Getting a few models from some of the big names would have made it a success, I suspect that getting a few smaller niche manufacturers couldn't do it.
It is incredible that Cyanogen's commercial efforts flopped so badly.
I suspect this is not so easy as they thought it would be: so many SoCs all slightly different. So they went the way of premium partners only to shoot themselves in the foot with the stupid exclusive contract in India.
You can see why hardware manufacturers would be keen on porting support but less on maintenance. Maybe the market needs to embrace some kind of maintenance fee? Doesn't have to be much but has to be enough to cover costs (I suspect $ 20 to $ 30 annually after the second year?).
Yup, pretty certain OP is failing to distinguish between Cyanogen OS (the ailing commercial wing of Cyanogen) and Cyanogen Mod (the active core FOSS project)
AO recently published an uncharacteristically rational opinion piece on the demise, explaining how COS deliberately fragmented their market, making their product and thus their business unworkable.
Amateur business(wo)men depressingly easily outmanoeuvred.
I spoke to them recently and brought up the issue of Cyanogen's doubtful future
They: "We have no news on this issue and our phone are not going to be affected as far as i'm aware"
Rooting their phones?
They: "i would certainly would advise against it as we don't support it"
"I'd be quite interested in one for my eldest lad who burns almost all of his saved pocket money for screens for his current one"
Let him burn all of it. But point out that the screen he buys with the last of it has to be taken care of, otherwise he's phoneless until he's saved up for a new phone.
@Tom Paine..
When you're done being a judgmental idiotic, put down your Daily Mail and listen while I explain a few things about him.
He spends every Saturday, whatever the weather, getting himself up at 6am, volunteering at a retired greyhounds kennels. He does, occasionally, get paid to work some days during school holidays.
When he isn't doing that, as well as the inordinate amount of studying from homework he gets from school, he does Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. He's pretty damn good at it too, holding several gold medals, a few silver and some bronze. That's from many international, national. local and European championships.
So tell me, what should I ask him to give up in order to live up to your expectations?
I already make him save his own money to pay for them.
I do have many stronger words for you but I won't type them here. You are, though, a cactus. Look up the meme.
WTF is this? Has being a grumpy old man gone out of fashion all of a sudden?
I'm just using the old-fashioned meme that _I_ didn't get given birthday or christmas presents worth £500, and neither did anyone else I knew, and that was only a few decades ago. 18th or 21st birthday, sure, fine. Yes, I'm sure he's a fine upstanding hard working kid who'll go a long way. I just don't understand why people spend such vast sums of money giving their kids presents. Sure, a phone's pretty essential these days, but I've had to make do with ten quid burners myself in the past and it didn't kill me.
No idea where your DM-reader ad hom comes from. The DM et al are anaethema to me.
>If he's old enough to have a smartphone he's old enough to get a Saturday job and save up for his own damn screen replacements.
See that's the problem with the British attitude. In America it would be "If he's old enough to have a smartphone he's old enough to create his own startup, become a billionaire, buy the manufacturer of phone and have them all fired."
The original Swift supported dual SIM operation and a micro-SD card, so it's disappointing that with this new model a micro-SD card can only be used in place of a second SIM (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it).
Still, I'm glad to see that it retains the 3.5mm headphone socket alongside the new USB-C connector.
Someone who knows they should have a second number for talking to their mistress, but misunderstands the point of having it and also wants to make "home videos" with said mistress.
Paris, because she has all the necessary qualities for both being a mistress and misunderstanding things.
Nice to see sd card (with ability of dual SIM use if SD card omitted) and an OS that's going to see security patches.
If it has removeable battery it would tick all the boxes for an ideal everyday use phone at a v.good price for the build quality (as well as battery change an easy way of extending phone lifepsan, key reason I like removeble battery is sometimes the only way to fix some glitches is full power and restart off which is fairly easy & instant when battery is immoveable but with fixed battery is not)
I was wowed by the Regs Swift review last year, so a Swift was my Chrimbo present from Mrs Page.
Really cannot fault the phone. The only niggle I might have is the quirk that it doesn't allow it's own number to be set in the OS - apparently a Cyanogen thing. It hasn't stopped me doing anything - that I know of.
However, the companys support seems to be run by the primary school the Keystone Cops went to. When I got the phone, I tried to register - as advised - which proved impossible due to a clunky website. Eventually, after waiting a couple of weeks (website wasn't fixed and claimed I hadn't entered my email address) I managed to get through to someone who made it plain this was a man+dog operation.
Fast forward 11 months and (1) I am still being spammed by Wileyfox and (2) I am still waiting for the free screen protector I was supposed to get when I registered.
All of that said, I do like the look of the plus. If it's as good as the Swift I've had for a year, it deserves great things.
Fast forward 11 months and (1) I am still being spammed by Wileyfox and (2) I am still waiting for the free screen protector I was supposed to get when I registered.
I know this sounds like a silly question, but are you sure you don't already have the screen protector? I bought a Storm and was wondering where it was in the box, then noticed that it was actually pre-fitted!
Fast forward 11 months and (1) I am still being spammed by Wileyfox and (2) I am still waiting for the free screen protector I was supposed to get when I registered.
I am still waiting for the rebate on the phones I bought back way-when. In fact, I am waiting for them to respond to the emails that I have been sending them.
The chances of me getting new WileyFox handsets for BongoJoe Villas is, excuse pun, swiftly diminishing.
It looks and has VERY similar specs to the Xiaomi Redmi 3S - which is absolutely no bad thing at all. It seems to be about £30-40 more expensive but you're getting local support, a local ROM and that brilliant screen replacement offer. I'm happy to import from China and pocket the difference but for your average Joe this does look good. Other than waterproofing I look at my Redmi 3S and wonder just what it is that a £600 iPhone/Galaxey/Xperia etc. has that I might be missing.
Have an upvote from a fellow Xiaomi user; my Hongmi Note gets many admiring looks; then looks of disbelief when I tell them the specs and the price.
Had a multi-millionaire fawning over it last weekend, he kept asking me to confirm what it was and how much it cost; I thought he was going to try and buy it off of me, especially when I showed him the spare Li-ON battery & charger (cost £2.50 inc p&p)
I seem to remember a Spanish firm getting panned in here a few weeks ago, for doing almost exactly what WileyFox do.
Came wondering exactly the same!..
IS THE TIME-BOMB Lii "BATTERY" REPLACEABLE OR GLUED IN?????
If it's the former I'll definitely be grabbing a few of them if they'll be out in time for Christmas but the webpage is ominously evasive. So they've glued it in then. ---->
:(
The bastards.
I've got the original Swift (emergency, cheap replacement for dead HTC One M8) and really rate it - reliable, comfortable, and am loving Cyanogen (first time I've used non-stock Android on a phone). Also, my track record of cracking screens made the cheap replacement option appealing, though weirdly (for me) I've yet to use it as it's a tough little bugger.
Only minor gripe is the camera doesn't perform too well if light isn't spot on, but it cost me just over £100 (when they had the cashback offer) and has been otherwise faultless - it just works.
Contract with Voda about to come to an end, so heading SIM only and planning on putting some of the (significant!) savings away for eventual replacement - this looks a strong contender.
that price might need VAT adding - their shopping basket is not entirely clear.
A URL would have been nice: https://www.wileyfox.com/
I note that you can have a spare battery (£15)
It will be interesting to see real customer reviews, battery life is something that really interests me with toys like this.
Broken website. How does it compare to this:
There's no mention of replaceable batteries on the specs page.
I'd noticed that, and linked it to the unibody aluminium construction. I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, but I think this is a sealed case, and on those grounds I won't be buying it as I tend to keep my phones for longer than a couple of years. And even in a two year timescale, I've had a couple of batteries go bad in eighteen months.
We have two of the first gen Swifts in this house and they are very capable devices. I'd be tempted by one of these for myself if the screen was 1080p and the fingerprint scanner was on the front, but I guess I'm just going to have to wait for my OnePlus Three order to get to the front of the queue.
It is Cyanogen 13 - equivelent to Marshmellow. I presume the OTA updates are meant to suggest that Nougat will arrive sometime. And then?
As a long term Nexus owner who ain't going the blingy Pixel/Flagship route I'm looking for another provider who will give long term support (which in this mad disposable land fill orientated world > 6 months but possibly not > 2 years)
If it already runs CM then, yes, it will get an update to Nougat and presumably whatever comes after that. Timing maybe an issue. Haven't seen anything on CM about Nougat but my S5 builds have been getting very busy recently presumably because of upstream work: security fixes are generally pushed pretty quickly.
The support for CM for many devices is quite often breathtaking. Well worth taking a look to see if anything you have is supported.
I bought the Wileyfox Storm last year, on the basis of the el Reg review. It was an excellent phone for the price. Unfortunately I trashed mine back in March by dropping it 8 feet on to tarmac. The phone still worked, but the screen was bolloxed. Replaced it with the Swift and have been very happy since. Being able to customise just about everything is a real plus.
About the only criticism I can make is that file transfer can be a bit buggy; it sometimes takes a couple of attempts before the phone and my laptop play with each other.
The Swift 2 looks very tempting. I'm happy with my original one right now, but my other half is looking for a new phone and the Swift2 might be just the ticket for her.
I bought a Swift a year or so back, and don't intend to change for a while but when I do I'd be happy with the new one. Main plus is the removable battery, although it took a while for them to be available I've now got a spare.
Only negative I've had is the USB socket is a bit deep due to the case back so a lot of plugs don't stay in very well.
I've had a Swift for several months. It's a nice little phone, but after the Cyanogen 13 "upgrade", I'm no longer able to disable a SIM through Settings. This is a serious flaw in a phone that's advertised for its dual-SIM capability, especially as I planned to use it with a UK SIM and a US SIM installed. Now, when I'm in the US, I have no way to disable the UK SIM. Recent developments at the organisation behind Cyanogen make me pessimistic that this will be fixed. Fortunately, I only spent £100 on the phone, but I'm still annoyed.
I'm slightly surprised they're saying the memory is only expandable to 64GB. Surely the SDXC spec allows far more than that, and should certainly cover the currently available 256GB micro SD cards?
I don't seem to be able to download a spec sheet for the Swift 2 + from the wileyfox website. The link just ends up at the checkout page with a Swift 2 + already added to the cart.
Edit: to ask if CyanogenMod 13 allows for xprivacy to be installed?
I have an older music player that will work with larger cards if they are reformatted FAT32. Possible WF don't know or haven't tried this.
One thing I'd like to know from the review is whether GAPPs come installed or not. I really don't need Maps and Store turning on for their own reasons, can live without GAPPs and they are hard to uninstall without starting over.
Now that 'the masses' are getting sick of the bloat of the main desktop and phone OSes, could this herald a new era of devices where you get a a lean OS with bare minimum included but decent support/updates for say 5 years?
Not sure what I would call this business model, but I sometimes wish I could buy [IT kit, phones, tablets, laptops, PVRs etc] which was a little more expensive but worth the extra as some of the cost would go towards supporting it in the future.
Maybe the masses just prefer to buy something new every year....
"WileyFox sold a respectable amount – half a million devices – without becoming a household name. But that was a tweaked reference design. With its first in-house design, launched today, that's sure to change."
Yeah, still don't see it becoming a household name. Sure, it looks like a decent enough phone. But there are now an awful lot of decent enough phones at the £150-200 price point, as well as a huge variety that are a bit less or a bit more depending on exactly what you're looking for. Being a decent but extremely generic phone that looks and costs the same as all the others is not something that will catapult you into the public awareness.
Maybe they sketched out the case and logo.
Depends what they mean by design. I did a 4G (not Wimax or LTE) VOIP only "handset" using a PCMCIA modem using a handmade case and catalogue industrial PCBs in 2007. In a sense I designed it.
Did they really pick the chips, layout a PCB etc, assemble it, debug, do the approvals etc?
Blimey!
Your police service is undertaking a regime change operation against its own government AND the WileyFox US site is depressingly desolate. No wonder you're sad!
Still, you're welcome to nip over and pick one up in person. Might be worth booking a trip over 20th Jan anyway.. just in case things take a sudden turn to the extra-squiffy over there? We might even have an old bridge knocking around somewhere, you could add to you collection O;-)
Before you consider make sure you check the GSM, 3G and LTE Radio frequency cover of this phone. It is very limited for the US use and I don't think you can get LTE / 4G in the US with this phone as it only covers Band 3, 7 and 20 LTE ( for Europe and most of Asia ).
I picked up the WF Storm at the start of the year and have been really impressed with it so far... but it does have some shortcomings.
1: Support is pretty bad compared to the swift
2: OTA updates often don't work unless you jump through hoops that involve removing all sim cards as well as SD cards.
3: Camera is great but has problems with the auto focus that make it very difficult to take quick snaps.
4: Microphone is dreadful when in a case... and no the case doesn't obscure the mic, in fact there's at least 4-5mm of space all around it... often you can only use the OK google function from 2ft or less and often only after removing it from the case.
5: Fixed battery... never liked it and this is the first phone I've ever owned that has one.
6: Sound quality is pretty dire with just a single rear speaker.. even the Moto G had front facing stereo speakers so this is a big fail in my book.
But releasing a new model every year is pointless to me, after 10 months I'm not even considering a replacement and on average make my phones last 3yrs.
So if they're still about in 2018, I'll be sure to check out whatever they bring out then.
...I've finally lost my trusty Blackberry Z10 (choke, sob) and have to bite the bullet and go back to Android. (EE palmed me off with a Samsung A5 with, I assume, Samsung's crappy app stack -- at any rate, the apps and UI were utterly shite, and I found the thing so frustrating in daily use that eventually I lost my temper with it and deliberately smashed it to bits, which was _very_ satisfying.)
So I'm looking at this and thinking that whilst £200 is a lot more than I'd LIKE to pay for a phone, it's clearly much better than £500+ for some obnoxious phablet or (shudder) iPhone. Trying to think of showstoppers before shelling out for one... can anyone help?
- does it support USB mass storage mode, or that horrible Windows-only bastardisation? (I'm on LInux.) If so does that cover the on-board storage as well as the SD card?
- are wifi hotspots standard issue these days? It goes without saying that it'll do that? I don't have fixed line internet at home, I've managed quite happily just tethering to 4G phones for the last 3.5 years)
- non-replaceable battery is a bit crap. I really appreciated being able to carry a ten quid spare power cell around with me for the BB (which had particularly terrible battery life). I don't need 24h, I need ~11h - enough for my commute and a day at work with moderate use.
- Cyanogen Mod. I know very little about this except that it's a Free /open Android fork, but I had some vague idea the project was on it's last legs and likely to fold. Will I be left without support if so?
- do WF push security updates promptly? That was another thing I hated about the Samsung -- EE didn't push a single security update that I noticed in the six months I had the wretched thing.
I'm going to stick my neck out here a bit (especially posting as a yank), but if you're going to go Chinese, why not go all in instead of hiding behind Eurobranding? (Not a dig at the Wileyfoxen per se, they look very reasonable).
I have a Huawei P8 Lite which I purchased for the equivalent of just under a hundred quid, and I'm struggling to see what people pay more to get.
- It has a very respectable screen
- Dual sim slots
- Micro SD on the second sim slot, but I rarely use it
- Huawei's EMUI seems to get some shit from westerners, but I quite like it (and it's had updates)
- Absolutely zero google services enabled
- Reasonably tough - it takes repeated falls onto hard floors (more since I realized I can get away with it)
- Awesome battery life, with reasonable disabling of gps (which should probably be left off anyways), I can coax a few days out of it without much worry.
Admittedly the battery is non-removable, but that seems to be very much par for the course these days (god I miss my old blackberries). My girlfriend has an iPhone 5s on a $200+/mo 'family plan' from Verizon, and I have a sub-hundred quid phone on a Tracfone plan for maybe $6/mo. I'm really having a hard time trying to justify the difference in price.
FWIW, the Wileyfox seems to be based on Xiaomi hardware, and that was one of my two finalists when I picked the P8. I don't think I would've been disappointed by either of them. It's probably long since time to drop the stigma of buying Chinese.
So I'm replacing a 3 year old Blackberry Z10 that supported proper 4G. I was literally just about to buy one of these when I spotted that they only support 4G LTE. Should I care? (I only have so many cycles available to nerd out on and took a conscious decision that life was too short to start memorising phone model numbers, frequency bands and whatnot, so be gentle if this is as dumb a question as I suspect.)