HMD’s latest Android phone reminded me of both Fairphone… and CMF?!
HMD is still looking for an identity and for now, it's settled on repairability and modularity.
JoriPress
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.
