UK-based phone maker Wileyfox is offering discounts of up to £70 off of new, unlocked handsets if buyers opt in lock screen adverts. The Wileyfox Swift 2, Swift 2 Plus, Spark X and Spark Plus are all now available to buy with Add-X, for £120, £100, £80 and £70, savings of £70, £60, £60 and £50, respectively. Swiping left will see you unlocking the phone as normal while a right swipe will take you to the offer, deal or article presented. Launch partners include Dominos Pizza, Ministry of Sound, Reuters and Buzzfeed, but the idea is that over time, the ads will become more tailored to each user. The good news for refuseniks is that you're not required to avail yourself of any of the deals presented and in the future, if you feel that the idea of carrying ads around in your pocket all day is too invasive, you’ll be able to pay £40 to have the ads removed altogether. Cheap Android phones get even cheaper How it works right now is you choose the phone you want from Wileyfox’s site and whether you want to buy it unlocked with the Add-X discount or without it. If you pick the former, Add-X kicks in during the set-up process after you’ve connected to the Internet and set up your Google account. Add-X asks you to enter your age (from a number of pre-set brackets i.e. 18-24, 35-34, etc) and gender (right now, just a choice between male, female or N/A). You can even enter a location (we just put 'London, UK'), though this isn’t compulsory. Wileyfox's chief marketing officer Naeem Walji told PC Mag that the idea is for Add-X to be "non-invasive" and to not track individual users, although the platform will evolve over time, based on the adverts and articles that people click on and the age and gender info you input. It should be noted, however, that if you swipe right on an ad or article, at this point, any data you hand over or anything which can be derived from cookies will between you and that third party. The plan is to appeal to buyers who want a phone for around £100, without having to skimp on quality. People on capped plans worrying about how much Add-X might bite into your usage needn't worry; it apparently burns through a mere 10-20MB every month. "Deal-seekers, the bargain hunters have an opportunity to get the same Wileyfox experience at prices of up to 42 per cent off," Walji said. "The Add-X model really allows another price point to enter the market, but without the compromise on the overall experience in terms of hardware and software." Though not available to buy with Add-X now, Walji added that the top-of-the-line Swift 2 X, which normally goes for £219, will be available for £139 with Add-X later on, an £80 discount. Talking about plans to integrate Amazon's Alexa into the Wileyfox range, Walji said that the company plans to offer a "fully integrated Alexa experience" for £99.99 with Add-X beating HTC's U11, (which starts at £599) by half a grand. "If you're familiar with the way voice services work, you'll know that the chipset has a huge role in ensuring that the wake word, that could be 'Alexa' or 'OK Google' or 'Hey Siri', it's very chipset-dependant. The chipsets that support that today include in the Snapdragon 600 and higher range [The Swift 2 and Swift 2 Plus feature Snapdragon 430s]. "We've been able to fully integrate the wake word through a software solution both in partnership with Amazon and Qualcomm, to get this thing out there." The Alexa updates are reportedly rolling out to Wileyfox phones from the Swift 2 and upwards at some point before the end of 2017; that’s not long to go, so hopefully OTAs will arrive in time for anyone who is going to unwrap an Amazon Echo this Christmas. It will, however, be "a push" to bring Alexa to older phones like the Spark X and Spark Plus, which run on MediaTek MT6735s. Revenue Sharing Gateway Drug Back to Add-X; unfortunately, early Wileyfox adopters won’t be able to retroactively download Add-X and get credited the difference. The plan is for every Wileyfox user to have the Add-X app pushed out to their phone eventually, because, Walji added, the Add-X portal brings us a step closer to a revenue sharing scheme which was tipped last November. Playing around with the Add-X app on a Swift 2 Plus, we spotted a section marked ‘coming soon’ and something called Wileyfox Points. A year on, and Wileyfox is still keeping mum about the particulars, but the basic idea is with the revenue sharing scheme is that if you shop online at certain retailers, you’ll earn points which can be spent on future phones. Wileyfox has said that in theory, you should never have to pay for a phone ever again; it might be with Add-X turned on, a big chunk of the cash you'd have to part with is gone right from square one. It certainly seems like this is part of the revenue sharing puzzle and if so, then Add-X may be launching now as the gateway drug for Wileyfox Points. While information on all of that is still TBC, you can pick up Wileyfox phones for less now with Add-X. Here's all of the official prices with and without the Add-X discount applied: Other Wileyfox phones will be added to the line-up at a later date and will eventually cost:

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