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Inexpensive Smartphones Designed to be Repaired

Human Mobile Devices: "Bougie device. Basic price."

By Rain Noe - June 3

in Tech | Sustainability

Human Mobile Devices, or HMD, is a Finnish white-label manufacturer that started producing Nokia's phones in 2016. This year they stepped out from the curtain to reveal their own line of smartphones, the HMD Pulse.

Notably, this line of smartphones is designed to be repaired:

"HMD calls it 'Gen 1 repairability', empowering owners to replace a damaged display, bent charging port, or a depleted battery, without an engineering degree," the company writes. "Users can simply pick up a self-repair kit in partnership with iFixit."

"Our approach spans the whole lifecycle of our devices: We make devices that last; we help keep devices in use for longer; and we harvest recycled materials – then we do it again."

The phones run Android 14 and are 4G rather than 5G, which goes some way towards explaining the Pulse line's shockingly low prices. ("Bougie device. Basic price" is the company's tagline.) The entry-level Pulse is £100 (USD $127), the Pulse + is £130 (USD $166) and the Pulse Pro is £150 (USD $191).

All three models are the same size, 163mm (6.4") tall, 75mm (3") wide and 8.55mm (0.3") thick. What distinguishes the models are the cameras: Front/rear for each model are 8 MP/13 MP, 8 MP/50 MP and 50 MP/50 MP, respectively.

Also, all of those prices can be reduced via trade-ins.

Between the cheap asking price and the ability to self-repair the phones, I imagine these will fly off of the shelves. One place they won't, however, is in the 'States; they're currently unavailable here. That's a shame, as industry analyst Ben Wood reports nearly half of U.S. customers "would like to have a [post-warranty smartphone] repaired at a reasonable cost rather than replacing it with a new device."

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Anthony Towers

6 months ago

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I don't want to have to repair a phone. make it robust, make it last (like my 6 year old iPhone XR)

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- Dee An
  
  Anthony Towers
  
  6 months ago
  
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  Similarly, I've only bought waterproof phones (higher end Samsung phones), put them in cases and applied a tempered glass screen protector. Wireless charging means that I wouldn't even need to replace the USB socket should it ever wear out. That just leaves the battery to be be changed - a fiddly job but it only has to be done every couple of years.
  Durability is every bit as important as repairability.
  
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Stan Spangenberg

6 months ago

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See also Fairphone 5. They were a "bit" earlier.

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