HMD, the Finn The company that has been licensing the Nokia brand to make cheap and mid-range Android phones for over 7 years is finally getting around to doing it on its own. Now you will start to see cheap and mid-range phones branded as “HMD”, which stands for Human Mobile Devices. (The company says it plans to continue its relationship with Nokia.)
Some of these devices have already reached European markets (the HMD Pulse series), but the United States is getting the advantage. HMD vibration. It’s a $150 smartphone, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking. It leaves out too many features and HMD now takes the crown for the worst software policy of any known Android manufacturer. But if you want to spend very little on a mobile phone, the Vibe will do the trick.
Environment control
For me, the most important feature of a cheap smartphone is performance. If it is too slow and frustrating to use, then it doesn’t matter how cheap it is. So, good news: the HMD Vibe is a pretty smooth-performing smartphone considering its $150 price tag. My initial impression wasn’t great, as the phone was ridiculously slow while I set it up and installed all my apps, but once I fixed that, everything went pretty well.
It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 680 chipset with 6GB of RAM. I’m not saying this is a fast device; There’s even a slight delay when you swipe up on an app to go to the home screen. Applications do not launch at lightning speed. But I’ve been using Vibe for over a week (on 4G LTE, no less) and it’s been more than tolerable. I have played games like Pako forever and Alto’s odyssey without issues, and my benchmark scores put it on par with the similarly priced Moto G Play 2024.
Photography: Julian Chokkattu
However, remember to turn on adaptive refresh rate in the phone’s display settings menu. This increases the refresh rate from 60Hz to 90Hz. Things were a little choppy without it, but after I turned it on, there was a noticeable improvement in smoothness. Speaking of the display, it is a 6.56-inch LCD display that is decently sharp but not too bright. On sunny days, I had a hard time seeing the content on the screen while I was out of the house.
This phone looks pretty bland. It’s just a black rectangle, with a graphite type design on the black back. You do You get a headphone jack and a microSD card slot to expand the included 128GB of storage, but this phone doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor. This is a convenience available on its pair, the Moto G Play 2024, and allows you to access secure apps quickly without having to log in all the time. HMD offers basic face unlock, but it doesn’t work with apps and doesn’t work in the dark (or when you’re wearing sunglasses).