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Orange’s top seller is a phone you’ve never heard of

A little-known phone has topped the list of best-sellers on the orange.co.za website.

It’s called the Wileyfox Swift, and it has beaten a lot of big-name phones to that top spot in the list of best-selling phones for Q1 2016.

The Wileyfox Swift (which I’m just going to call the Swift from here, because damn) is a cheap, sub-R3k phone that seems to tick all the right boxes, certainly when it comes to what South African consumers are looking for.

For less than three grand, the Swift gives you LTE, pretty decent performance (quad-core Snapdragon chip ftw), a 13 MP camera and a five-inch screen. My favourite phone of last year, the Innjoo One 3G, may be cheaper than the Swift at R2 199 but it has no LTE radio. This phone, then, offers a lot of bang for your buck.

Interestingly, the best phones on Orange’s top ten list were the 16GB iPhone 6s which came in at ninth place, and Samsung’s Galaxy S5 which occupied position ten.

The 6s is arguably the best phone of the lot when it comes to looks and performance, but clearly South Africans are more interested in phones that offer value than they are concerned about having the very best.

Orange, meanwhile, is apparently very happy with how the 6s is doing.

“The locally sourced Apple iPhone 6s has done particularly well since its introduction to the Online Store. We are pleased with the sales results for the first quarter and the continuing support we receive from the local market,” said Orange Horizons country manager Blake Levitan in the press statement we received.

“In addition, we will continue to advance with our strategy to source more products locally for the online store, particularly in the smart device ranges, however customers can continue to expect a larger range of products sourced internationally that are not readily available in South Africa,” he concluded.

Poking around online, we found a tweet by Jonathan Morris (@jmcomms) showing that the Swift hits a score of just over 23 000 on Antutu, the smartphone benchmark we like to use here at the htxt.africa offices:

In comparison, the Innjoo One 3G managed a somewhat more impressive 29 000+ while we had it last year, so do with that information what you like. Yes, I’m still partial to the Innjoo and think it’s likely a better overall phone than the Swift, but there’s no denying that less than R3k for an LTE-capable phone is a very good thing indeed.

We’ll do a little digging and see if we can get a Swift in for review in the coming weeks.

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