Wileyfox Spark X

Wileyfox has provided us with some of the tidiest budget phones of recent years, but neither the Wileyfox Spark nor the Wileyfox Spark Plus proved to be quite as bright as we hoped.

While the Wileyfox Spark X attempts to improve matters by super-sizing a couple of the core specs, this has had a knock-on effect when it comes to the price. Whereas the Spark could be had for £90 and the Spark Plus £120, the Spark X costs £139.

This still places the Spark X firmly in the budget category, of course, but it also pitches it perilously close to Moto G5 territory. 

Perhaps even more uncomfortable for the British brand is the close proximity of the super-stylish Wileyfox Swift 2 a little further up the range.

In fact, you can get this more attractive stablemate for around the same price from Amazon, which is a little awkward.

Unfortunately, within the context of its elevated price bracket, the Wileyfox Spark X’s lingering issues are even harder to forgive.

Mod almighty

• CyanogenMod replacement is a lesser offering
• Wileyfox Zen is a clean, if inessential news feed service

Wileyfox phones have always been remarkable for their software, even on the occasions when their hardware hasn’t been anything special. That’s still the case with the Wileyfox Spark X, but not always for the right reasons.

The British company has recently been forced to move away from its use of the now-defunct CyanogenMod, which was a much beloved and highly customisable modification of Google’s Android OS. Sure enough, the Spark X model we were sent seemed to come with a custom take on Android 7.0 Nougat.

This looks a lot like the tweaked CyanogenMod of previous devices, which was very much like stock Android but with a few visual touches like a Wileyfox logo in place of the app tray icon.

Unfortunately, you also lose much of the customisation potential that many used to like about CyanogenMod and, by extension, Wileyfox phones. For example, gone is the powerful Themes system that let you change the look of the interface on the fly, as well as the ability to change the screen’s DPI and colour temperature.

Gone, too, is the AudioFX digital sound equaliser.

It’s not all losses here, though. Truecaller remains as the default dialler, which is handy for filtering out spam callers and unwanted text messages.

New this time is Wileyfox Zen, which is a custom news feed service accessed by swiping right from the home screen. It’s pretty standard stuff, as you pick from a small selection of media sources, stories from which are then funnelled into a constantly refreshed scrolling list.

It all looks clean enough, but whether you’ll break away from the likes of Flipboard or your chosen news app and take up with Wileyfox Zen is another matter entirely.

Design and display

• Plastic construction
• Display is bright, if not sufficiently sharp

Wileyfox hasn’t deviated from the solid plastic construction of the other Spark handsets with the Spark X. The front of the device is all glass, there’s a slightly chintzy shiny bronze plastic rim (at least on our white model), and a matt plastic removable cover that takes up the entire rear half of the phone.

The latter has a textured Wileyfox logo slap bang in the middle where you might hope a fingerprint scanner would be. And no, there isn’t one on the front either.

That’s a bit of a downer, as such biometric hardware is no longer a luxury feature. We recently had the £85 Vodafone Smart N8 crop up with a very creditable example, and it feels all the more premium for it.

Indeed, the Wileyfox Spark X’s design in general feels harder to praise than with the previous Wileyfox models thanks to its price. For just around £20 more you can get the solid aluminium rear of the Moto G5 or Wileyfox’s own Swift 2.

This isn’t an unpleasant phone to hold, though. That matt plastic back, along with the phone’s curved edges and not-too-heavy 163g weight ensure it sits well in the hand. At 8.75mm it’s hardly super model-skinny, but nor is it a total pocket filler.

The power and volume buttons are sensibly situated on opposite edges, which is particularly appreciated given that they are identically textured. You get a 3.5mm port on top and a micro USB slot on the bottom, the latter of which smartly doubles as the point at which you slip your fingernail in to prise away the rear cover.

You’ll need to do that to fill one of the two microSIM card slots, as well as to insert an optional microSD card. In order to do any of these things you’ll also need to remove the battery, which is a power user’s feature in a decidedly non-power user’s phone.

The Wileyfox Spark X’s 5.5-inch IPS LCD display is appropriately bright given the phone’s name. We found that keeping the brightness slider around the halfway point was the most comfortable setting for most scenarios.

That’s a pretty normal practice with high-end phones, but it’s far less common with budget handsets, which tend to be quite dim.

Of course, this still isn’t a high-end panel. Colours are fairly accurate, if a tad muted compared to more expensive phones, while the overall tone is on the warm side. But the main kicker here is the screen’s 720p resolution.

It’s true that the other Spark phones also have 720p displays, but they’re also much smaller. We’ve said it before, but in a 5.5-inch phone you really need a 1080p display resolution for an optimal experience.

Anything less and you can start to see the pixels, while the home screen icons here are almost cartoonishly big when you set them against a Full HD phone.

The important thing to note here is that it needn’t be this way just because of that £140 price tag. The Moto G5 and the Vodafone Smart V8 provide 1080p displays for just £20 to £30 more.

Interface and reliability

• Stock Android 7.0 experience fluid enough
• Phone didn’t work

As we’ve already discussed, Wileyfox has recently been forced to change its approach to software with a lightweight reworking of Android 7.0 Nougat. While this generally leads to a reasonably fluid experience on the Wileyfox Spark X, it’s not without its issues.

There are few of the general performance problems that plagued the Wileyfox Spark, probably thanks to the larger phone having double the RAM (just like the Wileyfox Spark Plus). Moving through the home screens and menus is fairly stutter-free, and flipping between multiple open apps didn’t pose a problem.

The app tray clearly delineates individual apps along alphabetised lines, which will either annoy or please you depending on what you’re used to. On the one hand, you can spot individual apps easily. On the other, there’s a fair amount of extra scrolling and a lot of unused space.

Overall, this take on Android is much less open to customisation than CyanogenMod. But then, the phone’s budget price tag would suggest that most owners wouldn’t exploit such options anyway.

What they would likely appreciate is Wileyfox’s continued use of Truecaller, which matches incoming calls against a database of known spam callers and offers you the option to block them.

The basic Android experience that’s on offer here is just fine. It’s the Wileyfox Spark X’s basic operation as a phone that posed a problem.

During phone calls with the Spark X, the other caller was consistently unable to hear anything from our end. We could hear them just fine, but it was like we weren’t talking to them at all.

Just to be sure we tried two different SIM cards from two different UK networks, but we had the same issue with both.

To be clear, this wasn’t a hardware issue. The phone’s mic worked fine when we used the bundled Sound Recorder app for voice memos. This appears to have been an issue with the new, seemingly hastily cobbled together software.

Movies, music and gaming

• 720p display not ideal for media
• Tinny but unobstructed speaker

No one’s going to buy a Wileyfox Swift X and expect a media powerhouse, but we still expect a modern phone to be able to acquit itself well with movies, music, and games.

With movies, the phone’s bright 5.5-inch display holds up reasonably well. Everything’s easy to see. It’s not particularly sharp, though, thanks to that sub-optimal 720p resolution. This means that Full HD content - which is pretty standard across the likes of Netflix, Amazon Video and YouTube - won’t shine here.

When it comes to gaming, the Wileyfox Swift X is a mixed bag. That large and bright display makes it easy to play most games, but again it doesn’t offer the sharpest experience.

While the phone’s rear-mounted speaker is more than a little tinny, its position at least means that you don’t find yourself blocking it with your finger, which is a design flaw that a lot of supposedly premium phones suffer from.

Actual gaming performance is generally sound. Guns of Boom, Super Mario Run, Implosions and Gear.Club all ran fluidly enough to be playable.

Music playback is just fine here, though that tinny speaker means that the addition of a set of headphones (you don’t get any in the box) or a Bluetooth speaker is a must.

This being a stockish version of Android you get Google Play Music as your standard music app, and it’s one of the better examples out there whether you’re downloading MP3s, streaming from its subscription service, or even uploading and then streaming your own tracks.

With 16GB of storage as standard there isn’t an awful lot of headroom for media, but it’s a start. You can also add up to 32GB extra through the aforementioned microSD slot.

Performance and benchmarks

• Modest specs no improvement on previous Sparks
• You can get much better performance for similar money

The Wileyfox Spark X runs on exactly the same hardware as the Wileyfox Spark Plus, which equates to a 1.3GHz 64-bit quad-core MediaTek MT6735 CPU and 2GB of RAM.

That’s the very definition of a modest spec, which the resulting benchmarks reflect. A Geekbench 4 multi-core score of 1,685 places it on a par with its little brother.

However, it’s considerably slower than the Moto G5 (2,377) and the Wileyfox Swift 2 (2,545), both of which utilise the more capable Snapdragon 430 chipset.

General performance is perfectly fine without being outstanding, with few stutters in general navigation. Booting up the camera app does take a couple of seconds, though, which is always a sign that you’re dealing with low-end hardware.

As is bringing up content-rich websites like TechRadar, which will flick up with all of the appropriate images rapidly on a high-end phone like the OnePlus 5, but which takes seconds to finish loading here.

Battery life

• 3,000mAh battery much bigger than previous Sparks
• Poor battery life under strain

If there was one component that really needed upgrading from the Wileyfox Spark and Spark Plus, it was the battery. Whether it was the compact 2,200mAh unit itself, poor software optimisation, or some other power-hungry component, it could be hard to make it through a day of usage with those phones.

Fortunately Wileyfox has used the bigger form factor of the Spark X to fit a substantially beefier 3,000mAh battery. The result is a phone that can get you through a day of light usage, but it’s still not particularly great in this department.

Running our standard battery test of a 90-minute looping 720p video with the display brightness cranked right up, the battery life dropped by a staggering 32%. That’s a massive 10% more than we lost with the Moto G5 with its sharper (if smaller) display and smaller 2,800mAh battery.

Interestingly, we got the exact same result with the Wileyfox Swift 2, which has a different chipset and a smaller display. Perhaps Wileyfox needs to look at its optimisation work here.

On the plus side, 15 minutes of Guns of Boom gameplay sapped 7% of the battery. That’s not particularly great, but it’s not awful either.

For a phone with such modest specs and a battery that’s bigger than many budget alternatives, we’d expect the Wileyfox Spark X to make a real statement on stamina. As it is, there’s absolutely nothing to write home about here.

Camera

• Struggles with dynamic range and close-ups
• Selfie cam couldn’t seem to focus

Wileyfox has gone with a 13MP main camera with the Spark X, which is the same as the Spark Plus. This is a problem, as we didn’t think much of the latter.

We’re not sure if Wileyfox has made any improvements to the setup, but the Spark X suffers in all the ways you might expect of a budget phone - plus a few extra.

While it can capture some decent detail in good lighting at fairly close distances, landscape shots tend to deliver dull, mushy results.

The Spark X camera seems to suffer with extremes, too, such as when there are both bright skies and shady areas in the same frame.

There is an HDR facility, but activating it in the settings menu seemed to make no difference, almost as if it wasn’t activating. The result was that any outdoor shot that contained significant shade and bright light looked poor - either overexposed or murky.

The camera also struggled to focus on close-up subjects. On one occasion we tried three successive shots of a flower, moving the camera back a few inches each time and tapping to focus on the subject in the centre of the viewfinder, but it failed to do so each time.

We were almost impressed with some of the indoor shots we were able to get from the Spark X in terms of capturing realistic colours, though of course the camera still suffered from blowing out brighter areas and under-serving shady ones. Zooming in on the image, regardless of lighting conditions, would reveal masses of noise.

There’s an 8MP front-mounted camera too, but this seemed to have great difficulty focusing on faces in fairly normal indoor (but daytime) lighting conditions.

Wileyfox’s camera UI is quite pleasant to look at, but has a few faults of its own. There seemed to be a glitch with our review model that stopped the image preview feature from working. Fresh snaps would briefly appear at the top right, then vanish, and no amount of prodding in this area would bring it back.

The UI could also probably do with placing its filters and modes (such as HDR) nearer the surface - as it is, you need to press two buttons just to access them.

Camera samples gallery

Verdict

After the brilliance of the Wileyfox Swift range, the British company seems to have made three sizeable missteps with its Spark trilogy, culminating in the under-cooked Wileyfox Spark X.

For just a little less than the Wileyfox Swift 2 - not to mention the Moto G5 - you get a sub-optimal 720p display, a plastic design, poor battery life, underwhelming camera and glitchy software. If our experience is anything to go by, you might even get a smartphone that doesn’t do the ‘phone’ bit right.

In this, one of the most competitive areas of the smartphone market, such an unattractive combination simply isn’t good enough any more - if it ever was.

Who's this for?

The Wileyfox Spark X is for those on a strict budget of £120 to £130, and no more. For that money you get a just about competent all-rounder, but you can do much better if you’re willing to spend just a little more.

Should you buy it?

If you’re seriously strapped for cash and want to buy a no-nonsense smartphone, you still probably shouldn’t consider the Wileyfox Spark X.

There are just too many rough edges and areas that seem to have been rushed or poorly thought through - not least its capabilities compared to other similarly priced phones.

There are much better phones available for a similar amount of money, such as the following three handsets.

Wileyfox Swift 2

For just £10 to £20 more you can get yourself a considerable upgrade within the Wileyfox range. The Swift 2 is better built, with an aluminium body, and its 720p display is smaller - thus packing the pixels in more densely.

You’ll also get much better performance from a more mainstream chip, fingerprint authentication, and a faster camera.

You’re still not getting great battery life, and the company’s software situation seems to be a little up in the air right now. But the Wileyfox Swift 2 is simply a more elegant phone that feels like it belongs in a completely different class to the Spark X.

• Read our full Wileyfox Swift 2 review

Moto G5

Again, the Moto G5 costs a little more than the Spark X. But a small amount extra gets you a significantly better phone that replaces plastic with metal and lands you with better specs all round.

Those specs include a faster Snapdragon 430 chipset and a superior 1080p display, as well as a fingerprint scanner.

You’ll also get much more solid, reliable software in the form of Motorola’s thoughtfully tweaked take on Android. Again, Wileyfox has shown that it can mix it with the Moto G range, but not with the Spark family and certainly not with the Spark X.

• Read our full Moto G5 review

Vodafone Smart N8

We’ve mentioned two phones that vastly improve upon the Spark X for a little more money. How about one that matches or improves upon it for significantly less?

The Vodafone Smart N8 costs just £85, yet it boasts similar performance to the Spark X and a sharper display (it’s 720p but only 5-inches in size). It also comes with a decent fingerprint scanner, which makes it much more convenient to use.

Top that off with a stock version of Android, and the only reason you might justifiably prefer the Spark X is if you’re not on Vodafone - which is admittedly a very real and valid possibility.

• Read our full Vodafone Smart N8 review

First reviewed: August 2017