HMD has stepped out from the Nokia shadow and announced a new trio of affordable, repairable phones under its own Pulse branding.
The HMD Pulse Pro, Pulse Plus and Pulse are notable for a couple of key reasons. For one thing, they’re the first phones to carry the HMD branding.
This Finnish manufacturer has, for a number of years now, been most notable for licensing out the Nokia name. If you’ve ever used a Nokia-branded Android phone, you’ve actually been using an HMD product. As tipped earlier this year, that relationship appears to be coming to an end with the arrival of these first three HMD phones.
The HMD Pulse Pro, Pulse Plus and Pulse all mark themselves out by their repairability. Owners will be able to replace a damaged display, bent charging port, or depleted battery, without major difficulty.
This will be achieved in conjunction with repair specialist iFixit, which will supply self-repair kits for the range at a price starting from just £17.99.
Away from these headline elements, the HMD Pulse Pro, Pulse Plus and Pulse look to be the sort of solid affordable Android phones that HMD has been delivering under the Nokia brand, but with a little extra style and a particularly youthful focus.
The flagship HMD Pulse Pro (title image) offers a “market-leading” 50MP selfie camera that can capture sharp selfies even in low light conditions. Selfie Gesture Navigation, meanwhile, opens up the possibility of triggering selfies with a two-finger salute, a finger-heart, a thumbs up, or a two-handed heart sign.
Elsewhere it comes with a 50MP rear camera and a 2MP depth sensor, a 6.65-inch HDPlus 90Hz LCD screen, a 5000mAh battery with 20W charging support, and a humble Unisoc T606 processor with 6GB of RAM, as well as 128GB of storage.
The HMD Pulse Plus and the HMD Pulse give you the same screen, processor, and battery, but the Plus gives you a single 50MP main camera, while the HMD Pulse gives yo a 13MP camera. Both cheaper models come with lesser 8MP selfie cameras.
It appears you’ll get a stock take on Android 14 out of the box, with two full OS upgrades. You get IP52 certification and side fingerprint sensors with the entire range.
All three models are listed as coming soon on the HMD website. The HMD Pulse Pro will ship in Glacier Green, Twilight Purple and Black Ocean, but curiously doesn’t yet have a price. It looks likely to come in well under the £200 mark though, judging from the specs and the price of the other two.
The Pulse Plus starts from £129.99, and ships in either Apricot Crush or Midnight Blue. The Pulse costs just £99 and comes in Dreamy Pink or Meteor Black.