Update: 6 October 2018.
Wileyfox may even have funded another production run - amazingly - they're not only still showing it as available and at the bargain price, but they've added a new menu section for the phone, to their web site. I'll post more on this in another story.
Update: 3 Sept 2018, 7pm.
Wileyfox seem to have found some more units!! And it's even cheaper now, at £79.99. It's not known how many they've found, but I'd suggest it's old stock and not part of a new manufacturing run. So be quick!
I had my suspicions already, but reader 'cjr' finally managed to get this admission from a Wileyfox support 'team leader':
"I do apologise we are not getting any more stock of the wileyfox pro."
Here's my own timeline of the Wileyfox Pro's existence. I doubt that it's a piece of hardware that many of you will have handled, since it's very low end, but I still rated it as 'nice in the hand' in my review and hey, it was just about the only current Windows 10 Mobile handset on sale for the first half of 2018.
Note that the first three items below are based on industry insider chat only and should be taken with a large pinch of salt. However, they do fit the facts!
- H2, 2016 - a big company approached Wileyfox to make it some low cost Windows 10 Mobile phones for giving out to employees for enterprise use
- H1, 2017 - Wileyfox tweaks a reference design and a number of phones are manufactured. I'm guessing something in four figures, i.e. thousands, at most
- June 2017 (approx) - the aforementioned company backs out of the deal and goes a different way for its phones. (The presumably very annoyed) Wileyfox is then left with a large number of Windows 10 Mobile handsets which it wonders what to do with. The solution: sell them to end users, filling at least some of the gap left behind by Microsoft when it stopped making (specifically) the Lumia 550 and 650.
- August 2017 - the Wileyfox Pro is shown off at IFA
- November 2017 - the WFP is available on the Wileyfox web site
- December 2017 - Part 1 of my AAWP review
- January 2018 - Part 2 of my AAWP review
- February 2018 - Wileyfox enters administration and the future of all its phones is very uncertain, to say the least
- March 2018 - the company is saved by a buy out by Santok (STK) Ltd
- April 2018 - the WFP is back and available
- August 2018 - the phone gets official Fall Creators Update provisioning, so at least current owners can get updates until December 2019. The back story to this is that this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for me pestering my contacts in the Microsoft updates team. Month on month for seven months, supplying diagnostic data and doing testing, and finally the WFP was properly provisioned. Not that there was a great rush, but it was clearly something that had gone wrong in terms of communication between Wileyfox and Microsoft.
And now we have the official word that the WFP won't be returning to stock. Which absolutely fits the facts. Wileyfox had a few thousand of these devices to sell and now they're sold. End of story.
Well not quite, since there a few thousand people out there (including me) who have a fully working WFP and who will be getting the usual UWP app and OS updates until the end of 2019. But given that the phone is decidedly low end, don't expect too many mentions here on AAWP in the future!
