HMD's latest Android phone reminded me of both Fairphone... and CMF?!

17 years ago, I started my mobile tech writing career by focusing on Nokia when it was on top of the smartphone world, so you can imagine how nostalgic I felt about HMD’s resurrection of the Nokia brand. Soon, though, that relationship felt awkward to me, like seeing an ex from another life, knowing both of us have incredibly changed over the years. HMD rode the Nokia fame for a few years and eventually shed the brand away, now becoming just HMD. Its new Android phones are… phones, I guess.

I haven’t tested one yet, but on paper, they do feel like a perplexing mix of originality and drabness, new and old, desperation for attention and unfinished products. A bit like the HMD Fusion party I attended, where I saw nothing but iPhone-toting teenage influencers all around, with a few HMD product managers and employees trying to demonstrate nerdy concepts like repairability and modularity to what felt like the wrong crowd. They got some TikToks and Instagram Lives out of it, sure, and maybe a moment or two of semi-virality, but it all felt like a cry for attention from a company that doesn’t know its own identity yet.

The HMD Fusion, though? A curious phone, for sure. In a way, it’s a mix between a repairable Fairphone 5 and a modular CMF Phone 1. As odd as it sounds, this Android phone has the easy disassembly of a Fairphone and the pogo-pin open-source attachment approach of CMF by Nothing. Cool, right?

The phone’s back is full of tiny screws that you can loosen up to remove the back plate. That reveals a few extra screws and some connectors to remove or disconnect, and you should be able to separate the display from the phone’s internals. The phone’s full disassembly documents are provided on iFixit, and they explain how to replace the display, battery, back cover, charging board, and SIM tray. Having taken apart and put back together the Fairphone 5 a few times, this looked so familiar to me, even if the HMD Fusion isn’t as fixable. You can’t easily change each camera lens, the speaker, or the earpiece here like you can with Fairphone. But this is still a few steps ahead of many, many barely repairable Android phones I see on the market nowadays.

The HMD Fusion’s other particularity is the pogo pins on the back. The company is talking about “outfits” for the phone, but that’s a fancy name for attachments and/or accessories. There’s a wireless charging case that connects to the pins and adds 5W wireless charging with magnets (the first time I’ve seen Qi implemented with a case on a phone with no wireless charging at all). There’s also a water-resistant rugged cover because the phone itself doesn’t have any IP rating, as well as a case with a built-in flashlight, one with a kickstand and a gamepad.

I’m not sure I’m convinced by any of these accessories, to be honest, but the gamepad could be interesting because it connects directly via the pins — no battery-draining Bluetooth controller necessary.

Like CMF’s project, HMD has opened up the development toolkit for its phone to let anyone contribute ideas and designs. For now, most of them are concepts, like projectors and speakers and other Moto Mod-inspired ideas, but technically speaking, if you have a 3D printer, you should be able to print the simpler, plastic-only designs and attach them to your phone.

Other than the repairability and modularity aspects, there’s nothing to tell about the HMD Fusion or the time I spend with it. It’s a budget Android phone with a very decent chipset but limited RAM. It runs Android 14 out of the box in a very stock Android phone skin. And HMD may be the only company I didn’t hear the words “AI” from, so if that’s something you’re running away from, maybe this is the phone to get for you?

There’s no exact release date for the HMD Fusion yet, but when it goes live, it will cost £199/€249 (~$262 USD).