I probably have I’ve tested about 100 cheap phones over the last 9 years and never had to worry about carrying a backup in case things went wrong. Budget phones tend to be slow but work quite well. But I almost immediately regretted not bringing a spare smartphone when I took the HMD Fusion on a short trip to another state.
The first sample of this Android phone would freeze and reboot on the way to the airport. Then, further fueling my panic, I booted up to the home screen but my password didn’t work. “The password is incorrect.” That? Fortunately, a force restart would bring it back to normal. However, throughout the entire weekend of my friend’s wedding in Kentucky, the Fusion kept restarting. He also refused to launch Slack, although that may have been a blessing since work wasn’t on my mind the whole time.
HMD said they couldn’t replicate my issues, so the company sent me another unit. It’s been perfectly fine. It’s hard to suddenly shift gears after being so frustrated with this black monolith, but this is a decent $300 phone. It also has an ace up its sleeve that no other phone has today: mods.
The return of the modular phone
HMD may not be a name you are familiar with, so to quickly summarize, it is a Finnish company that licensed the Nokia brand to produce Nokia Android smartphones and feature phones (also known as fools). It started doing this in 2017, but earlier this year, the company announced that while it would continue making Nokia phones, it also plans to make phones under its same name (which, by the way, stands for Human Mobile Devices). Its feature phone business also continues, with bigger collaborations like Boring Phone and Barbie Phone.
The HMD Fusion is one of those devices (there were also the Skyline and the Vibe). It focuses on repairability – just remove a handful of screws and you can replace many of the parts, from the battery to the screen – and the company plans to sell these parts for seven years. (Much of this is necessary to comply with upcoming laws in the European Union.)
But what does it do? In fact The pogo pins on the back stand out. In fact, the entire back of the phone appears to be incomplete. This is because you can attach suits, as HMD calls them. These modular components can change the look of the phone with different colored backs. They do not adhere magnetically like iPhones and MagSafe. Instead, these sets are like cases and the pogo pins not only transfer power but also data.
Photography: Julian Chokkattu