HMD Skyline

It's surprisingly rare for the smartphone market to have a completely new competitor. The giants have too much market share, it seems, but HMD is giving it a shot, even though they're not 'new' as such. No, HMD has actually been using the Nokia brand for some time now, but their first smartphone, the Skyline, comes from HMD itself and is an attempt to establish a paradigm shift in the market where we as consumers have much more freedom to service and repair our own phones.

The concept is hard to criticise, it really is. Through a partnership with iFixit, the entire back of the phone is secured with standardised screws that require no heating or proprietary tools to open. Not only that, iFixit makes specific components for the Skyline, which means you can change the battery, screen and entire back cover yourself, without help. Of course, this has consequences. The phone weighs 210 grams and has a slightly boxy look as a result. The sharp edges make it easier to replace parts, but the rounded display edges create a kind of shape inside another shape, a polarising look that certainly won't suit everyone. On the other hand, there is a customisable button on one side, and it's hard to see who would be unhappy with that. It also has an IP54 certification, which is impressive considering it's partly modular.

In addition, it's clear that HMD has looked very carefully at what features a midranger should have, and the result is a phone that broadly offers what you expect, and only with very small sacrifices. The display, for example, is 6.5 inches and runs at 2400x1080. It's an AMOLED, naturally, offers 144Hz and peaks at around 1000 NITS. These aren't industry-leading specifications by any means, but they're not exactly disappointing either.

Inside you'll find a Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 accompanied by 8GB RAM and 256GB of space. You can get 12GB of RAM too, but even though the phone scores lower than other mid-rangers for the same money via benchmark tools like GeekBench, it's not something you'll notice. There's also microSD so you can expand the space yourself, thank you very much. The more modest specifications also mean that the battery life is truly amazing and can easily stretch over two days.

When it's time to throw in the towel, the phone has 33W wired charging and even 15W wireless and 5W reverse. That's pretty impressive, especially when you can switch the entire back cover yourself. Furthermore, we're still seeing, though thankfully to a decreasing degree, that these mid-range smartphones are sacrificing wireless charging, but not here.

So what exactly are you sacrificing? Well, it has to do with software. First of all, HMD offers you a largely stock version of Android, one of the closest you'll get to it anyway, and therefore it's as customisable and well-functioning as you want without all the unnecessary bloat. No, the problem arises because it's clear that even though HMD wants you to maintain your phone yourself and not replace it as often as usual, they only offer two years of OS upgrades from Google and only three years of security updates. A lack of software support and a focus on maintenance stand in stark contrast to each other.

There's slightly better news in the camera system. The central sensor is a whopping 108 megapixels and is equipped with both PDAF and optical stabilisation. This is accompanied by an ultrawide and a 2x optical telephoto lens. That's not bad at all, and if you give the heavy main lens in particular enough light, it can easily produce nice images, albeit with a slightly uneven depth of field. You have to be quite careful with focus here, but when you 'hit', the images are sharp and with relatively neutral colour chemistry that stands in stark contrast to similar phones from Google and Samsung.

At £400 you can get better phones on most parameters, but HMD really proves that they have a place in the market with the Skyline. Their focus on repairing and servicing their own property is worthy of applause, and the compromises they have chosen to make are almost all understandable. They should offer several years of OS updates and special security updates, but as a starting point this is a success.