Direct line: Cut out the phone operator and buy your handset direct

THE ERA of renting your TV set instead of buying it drew to a close long ago. And now, the idea of paying monthly subscriptions to a mobile phone company could also soon be history.
The Wileyfox Swift is sold direct, cutting out the phone operatorThe Wileyfox Swift is sold direct, cutting out the phone operator
The Wileyfox Swift is sold direct, cutting out the phone operator

Leasing your phone from the likes of O2 or Vodafone used to be pretty much a necessity, because the cost of buying outright was prohibitive. But the economics of supply and demand have kicked in - and now, even the most sophisticated handsets can be had for the price of a few meals out.

You still have to rent airtime from a phone company, of course, but the cost of doing so is far less when it’s not part of a hardware bundle. And even though you won’t qualify for a handset upgrade every couple of years, you will still save money in the long run.

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Two phone manufacturers - one a familiar name, the other less so - in particular have built their business model around selling to you direct. But you can buy pretty much any make of handset unlocked and SIM-free, without ties to any one network.

You can then choose to buy SIM-only airtime month-by-month, or pay for it as you go. If you shop around, £10 a month will get you at least 2GB of data, unlimited texts and around 200 minutes of calls - but many other permutations are available.

The makers most keen to sell direct are Motorola - now part of the Chinese giant Lenovo - and a British company, established just last year, called Wileyfox, which sells exclusively online via its own website and Amazon.

At £125, Wileyfox’s mid-range model, the Swift, is astonishingly good value for money, matching the still-available 2015 version of the excellent Motorola G feature-for-feature yet costing £55 less.

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In both cases, you get a five-inch, 720p screen (that’s high-definition but not the highest), 16GB of storage and 2GB of memory, and an SD card slot for further storage. There’s a 13 megapixel camera on the back and a much-better-than-average 5mp lens on the front, for decent quality selfies. The Swift also has a removable battery, which means you can carry a spare for emergencies.

Both are Android phones but the Wileyfox runs an unusual, modified version of the software, known as Cyanogen. It has fewer of the non-optional “bloatware” apps and services embedded by Google in the standard Android releases, so you’re not forced to run the unwieldy Newsstand app, for instance. Cyanogen is also easy to personalise with a range of themes, and it comes with an inbuilt equalizer for better audio reproduction.

There is a slight learning curve involved in mastering the modified system, but the advantages far outweigh the small inconvenience.

The Moto G, on the other hand, has a battery that outlasts the Swift and is slightly faster at loading apps. If you buy direct from Motorola it can be built in your choice of colours and engraved with a name, at no extra charge.

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Both models represent a sea-change from the recent norm, not only in what features you can expect, but in what you can expect to pay. More small manufacturers will start selling direct before the year is out - so as low as these prices are, they’ve not bottomed out yet.

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