The mid-range Android that lets you fix it • The Register

HMD is the company that made the post-Microsoft Nokia Android devices. Now it’s going by its own name – and offering greater repairability.

The HMD Skyline is a new Android phone from HMD. Formerly “Hon Hai Mobile Devices” and now “Human Mobile Devices,” HMD is the Finnish outfit that, for several years, sold Nokia-branded devices after Microsoft bought – then killed – Nokia’s phone unit.

Like the Nokia G22, the device HMD launched last year, the Skyline is designed to be repairable by users, and HMD launched it in partnership with iFixit, which rates the device 9/10 for repairability and offers half a dozen guides on replacing various components.

Our metallic pink review unit came with an iFixit repair kit, complete with a small Torx screwdriver for the single Y0-size screw in the base. This screw doesn’t hold the cover on; it merely turns a tiny cam that levers up one corner of the back panel, so you can pry it off with a spudger. It’s not an easy job, or one you’d want to do often. Even after you do, the battery is held in with adhesive strips. Maybe because of the removable back, the Skyline only has an IP54 rating rather than the IP68 of some other phones; safe to use in the rain, but don’t dunk it.

It is, however, user repairable, and spares are available separately. This is a valuable step forward, even if one possibly prompted by EU rules. As more people expect to keep phones longer, this is worth having, but there are caveats. For instance, HMD is only committing to two Android versions and three years of updates. It’s not up to Fairphone levels just yet.

If you do keep using a Skyline into the Android 16 era, you may need to root it yourself and install a replacement OS, which is far beyond the abilities of most end users. We have also yet to see any confirmation from HMD that it will provide any assistance with unlocking the device’s bootloader. This aside, it’s a fairly uncluttered version of Android 14 with little bloat. There are preinstalled launchers for Facebook, LinkedIn, FitBit, a handful other apps, and little else.

When we tried to use Facebook, the device paused while it downloaded the full version of the client. If you don’t want these apps, they can be removed, which is welcome. Xiaomi, to pick one example, could learn a lot from this device.

The smartphone that can selectively get dumber

The other novel aspects of the Skyline center on what HMD terms “Digital Detox,” although unfortunately not all of the features are ready yet.

The company already offers what it calls detox phones, which are essentially modern versions of pre-fondleslab featurephones, such as its modern take on the Nokia 2660 Flip, also known as The Boring Phone. The snag with devices like these is that they’re more than somewhat crippled as communications devices in the 21st century, because you can’t use WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and other IP-based messaging tools.

The Reg FOSS desk has friends and family in half a dozen countries and needs to talk to them, and GSM voice calls and SMS don’t cut it any more. If nothing else, they’re too expensive.

The Skyline defaults to bold high-contrast black-and-white icons on the home screen, which in principle reduces their addictive draw – but not by very much. It ships with a Focus mode button in its Settings drawer, and Grayscale Mode is in the usual place – but off by default, as it is on the privacy-centric Punkt MC02, despite its monochrome “Domus” homescreen. If you do enable Grayscale Mode on the Skyline, it adds an on/off button to the quick settings, a touch that we liked.

The Skyline is a solid mid-range phone with some of the Nokia styling from recent years. The screen has rounded corners and sits very slightly proud of a metal body with rounded sides but square corners at top and bottom, with just a millimeter or so of bezel at top and bottom. It can take dual nano SIM cards, or one nano SIM and a microSDXC card – but, sadly, not all three at once, which is a feature we’d like. We were also disappointed to find no headphone socket. It supports Qi 2 wireless charging, which in theory is backward-compatible – but it wouldn’t charge from the console of our 2019 Hyundai Ioniq. The battery is a relatively modest 4600 mAh, and charges at a maximum of 33 W. This should mean about an hour for a full charge.

The screen and cameras are pretty good. It has a 6.55-inch (166 cm) screen, with a resolution of 1080 x 2400 and 1,000-nit brightness. It can refresh at 120 or even 144 Hertz, but in its normal power-saving mode, it’s just 60 Hz – although an adaptive mode switches to higher refresh rates when the OS feels you need them, then drops back down. The rear camera can do up to 108 MP and there’s a 50 MP selfie camera inset in the top of the screen. HMD offers a specifications page and others have still more.

It has the now fairly standard fingerprint reader in the power button, which worked for us, although, as with many of these devices, not as reliably as we might hope – we frequently had to enter our passcode. There’s also an additional custom button on the left side, which is ridged for extra sensation. By default, a single press switches between silent, vibrate-only, or normal ring modes, and a double-press turns the torch on or off – which it often did in our pocket, and once while sitting on our car’s center console. Both actions are customizable, as is what a double-press of the power button does.

In our testing, the phone was responsive but did occasionally hesitate. It felt light but tough in the hand, and as a standby device the battery life was good. As is normal for most modern phones, the camera lens complex bulges out significantly at the back, meaning that a case is almost a necessity – but you don’t get one in the box, nor a charger, just a fetching pink USB-C cable.

It’s a decent midrange phone, and if the Digital Detox mode does what it promises, it should be valuable addition. This vulture’s partner noted that she would require the option to allow some nominated contacts to get through even when in detox app-blocking mode, though. We suspect that such advanced filtering would need some kind of unified inbox for messages and notifications – a feature that we badly miss from our Blackberry Passport a decade ago. Alas, modern Android has nothing like it, nor does iOS. To get anything even partially resembling it, you need to go to paid third-party services such as Beeper, which we discussed a few years ago.

We tried Beeper Mini, the company’s freebie iMessage for Android app, last year, and it worked well – for a short while. If HMD bundled such a subscription, that really would be a killer feature.

The Skyline is available in different models in different regions: 8 GB RAM plus 128 GB flash, 8 GB RAM plus 256 GB of flash, and a premium model with 12 GB RAM and 256 GB of flash. Not all countries get all models, and at the time of writing, it’s out of stock almost everywhere we looked. We reviewed the middle (8/256) model, which should retail at around $500 (€500 or £400). If it supported dual SIMs and a memory card, and had a headphone socket and a bigger battery, we would rate it as the best mainstream Android handset we’d seen in a couple of years. Without those, it’s just a decent contender. ®