The latest phone to break out of the Wileyfox den is the Swift 2 X, apparently so named as it’s the highest-end phone from the Swift 2 set; it’s got an x-tra big, xtra-detailed screen and an xtra-big battery, all housed in the same premium-feel milled metal body.

The specs are more or less the same as those of the Swift 2 Plus; 16-megapixel main camera, 32GB of storage, 3GB of RAM, Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor, Cat 4 LTE, QuickCharge 3.0, Type C USB.

For many the most significant stat here will be the price; it’s an xtra-affordable £219.99 unlocked and SIM free. Read on to find out just what you get for such a princely sum.

• Design, features and display
• Network performance and connectivity
• Processor and battery
• Cameras
• Cyanogen, the move to Android 7.0 Nougat and revenue sharing
• Conclusion

Wileyfox Swift 2 X: Design, features and display

Like the other models in the Swift 2 range, the X’s body is machine milled from a single block of aluminium. It looks and feels a lot nicer than a phone for its price should. The two grilles at the bottom (only one of which houses a speaker, mind) and hexalobe screws give it the kind of fancy industrial affectations you normally only seen on phones a couple of hundred quid more expensive.

Smudges stand out on the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protective layer, especially when the screen’s inactive. This is the only thing which gives lie to the phone being cheap as chips, because when the screen’s on - a 5.2-inch 1920x1080 LCD display - the Swift 2 X’s best asset shines brightly.

It’s amazing what a difference 1.1 million pixels can make. If we had one gripe about the Swift 2 Plus, it’s that its 720p panel, while decent enough felt a little old school.

On the Swift 2 X’s Full HD resolution display, YouTube videos, apps, games and the text on web pages just looks sharper. For £31 more, that’s a bargain. In raw numbers terms, you get 424 pixels per inch (ppi), a hair above the Full HD panels of the One Plus 3 and Motorola Moto G4 Plus (both 401 ppi).

Outdoor visibility is a little impaired by the reflective nature of the coating, but the brightness of the screen (360-400 nits) punches through. IPS means there’s no major discolouration at extreme viewing angles either.

We like that there’s now standard features like night mode to help blunt eye strain. You can even manually set the different colour temperatures between night and day and take all of the blue light out with the RGB calibration tool, if you wish.

The fingerprint scanner works well. It’s perhaps not as lightning fast as what we’ve seen on some of Huawei’s phones, but it’s good enough, taking less than a second to wake the Swift 2 X up from a dormant state.

The dual SIM tray (one micro, one nano) pops open with relative ease. Unfortunately, for those who like to have two numbers on the go at once, that secondary nano SIM slot also doubles as a memory card slot.

Storage-wise, you get 32GB, of which 23.80GB is available. You can (officially) add microSD cards of up to 64GB in size. You’ll otherwise have to get used to having a regular clear out if you want a second number.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X: Network performance and connectivity

As it’s sold unlocked, the Swift 2 X will work with any network; no long-winded registration process or credit check is required, just buy your SIM, top up, or sign up for a SIM-only plan and after popping it in, you’ll be connected in minutes.

The Swift 2 X comes with the same Category 4 LTE radio that’s present in the Swift 2 Plus, supporting the 800, 1800 and 2600 MHz radio frequencies (aka LTE bands 3/7/20).

In terms of download and upload speeds and latency, we recorded the following averages using the Speedtest.net app and SIMs on all the major networks:

Down / Up / Latency

• EE: (29.32Mbps) (46.61Mbps) (20ms)

• O2: (18.82Mbps) (20.5Mbps) (27ms)

• Vodafone: (44.72Mbps) (33.60Mbps) (27ms)

• Three: (19.32Mbps) (22.67Mbps) (36ms)

Generally speaking, there wasn’t much

in terms of web browsing

The single band WiFi radio (b/g/n) lets the side down; not being able to hop on to the faster 5GHz channel means you’ll add to the already congested 2.4GHz lane.

The Wileyfox Swift 2 X comes with NFC and is Android Pay-ready. We’re very keen to see what Wileyfox has up its sleeves with regards to its super-secret revenue sharing scheme which promises to build on this functionality. We’ll return to this section of the review and expound on that once we know more.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X: Processor and battery

Running the show beneath that milled metal hood is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 CPU plus 3GB of RAM.

The Swift 2 X scored 47,584 on AnTuTu benchmark, which is designed to test overall system performance by simulating everyday tasks. This puts it in a similar ballpark to phones like the Motorola G4 Plus (47,584) above the similarly-priced Samsung Galaxy J7 (33,107) and the more expensive ZTE Axon 7 Mini (43,165).

3D Mark’s Slingshot Extreme really saw the Swift 2 X struggle (scoring just 295). That said, big, action packed titles like Rival Knights and Micro Machines seemed to play well enough - proof that benchmarking apps aren’t always indicative of how a phone really performs. As you’d expect, less demanding casual games like Carcassonne and Neko Atsume worked just fine, so if you’re just after a couple of commute boredom-killers, you’ll probably be OK.

Wileyfox’s claims of being able to give you a full tank in under 90 minutes are more or less on the money; because the last 10 per cent of a lithium ion cell always takes longer to charge than the first 10 per cent, it’s not quite that quick. In our experience though, you will get a quarter full tank after 15 minutes and half full in 40 minutes.

That’s with an appliance capable of supporting Quick Charge though - with regular slow charger adapters or a laptop’s USB port, the going’s a lot slower. However you charge it, we like that you’re given an ETA on hitting 100 per cent, in hours and minutes.

The battery gave us a solid two hours of video streaming over 4G with the brightness on max and for general daily mobile use (calling, email and social media), you won’t fall short most days, though you’ll want to take that charging cable with you everywhere, just in case.

Don’t expect miracles when gaming. After playing Fire Emblem: Heroes for an hour, we were at 75 per cent down from a full tank. While that game needs an active data connection (which places extra strain on the battery) it’s a fairly basic game in terms of memory requirements (230MB/hour).

Regrettably, the battery’s not removable, though that’s the price you pay for having such a slim and compact design.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X: Cameras

The 16-megapixel camera is an OK shooter with a not-so-OK interface.

Stills are taken pretty much the very second you hit the shutter, with the exception of HDR shots, which take around 3-5 seconds to process, depending on the amount of information in the frame.

Typical settings like white balance and exposure are easy enough to toggle, things like HDR, Solarize, Sepia and Mono aren’t - until you realise that a customisable list of effects can be accessed by swiping left or right. Then there's hyperlapse and panorama settings which, inexplicably, are found in another menu. There's a lot of back and forth required with the camera's UI.

• Wileyfox Swift 2 X camera samples

Pictures taken indoors in artificially lit areas tend to be a bit noisy, something which becomes apparent the moment you zoom in. Outdoor shots on brighter days generally fare better.

Generally though we’re impressed by the camera. Full HD videos look nice and crisp at 30 frames per second and there’s a fun timelapse setting you can retroactively apply to your clips.

The 8-megapixel front camera isn’t as sharp and skin tones occasionally look a little bluish. It’s very quick to capture pics (again, with the exception of HDR) and you get the full complement of fun effects.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X: Cyanogen, the move to Android 7.0 Nougat and revenue sharing

There’s a couple of elephants in Wileyfox’s room - Cyanogen (which is on the way out) and the aforementioned revenue sharing scheme (which is on the way in).

At the time of writing, the update from Cyanogen to Android 7.0 Nougat still hadn’t arrived, so it’s worth noting that this review doesn’t take into account things like the battery saving aspects of Nougat nor the more immediate bonuses like improved multitasking and replying to messages straight from the notif bar.

The updates should have hit the entire Wileyfox range by the end of Q1 2017, so March at the latest.

We only know a few things about that revenue sharing scheme right now. The thinking behind this is that if you buy goods and services through bespoke apps, you’ll build up Wileyfox points, Nectar card-style.

Earn enough points and you’ll be able to redeem those against the cost of your next Wileyfox phone. It’s a shrewd idea; in theory you won’t ever have to pay for a phone again.

This could be a real game changer, one which would make the Swift 2 X a significantly more attractive buy.

Amazon and Google are signed on as partners, so the scheme could see you earning points every time you renew Amazon Prime or buy something over the counter using Android Pay. Or it could be something completely different.

We expect to hear more about this from Wileyfox itself during Mobile World Congress ‘17.

Wileyfox Swift 2 X: Conclusion

The Wileyfox Swift 2 X is a solid, reliable phone that does the basics with style. For £30 more, we think it’s a far better option than its Swift 2 Plus predecessor; that more detailed screen and comparable battery performance make it worth it.

We’d recommend this to anyone who is in the market for a good back up phone or for friends and relatives who say that they’d like a smartphone but are on a shoestring budget and don’t want to spend too much more than £200. That friend or relative who always say that they want ‘something like an iPhone‘ but their budget only covers the cost of one quarter of an iPhone? This might be the phone for them.

Our only real gripes are that the battery isn’t removable and if you want to flesh out the memory you’ll need to surrender one of the SIM slots.

Aside from that it’s one of the best buys out there, in terms of sheer value for money, if not the best.