HMD Fusion: A budget repairable smartphone with modular flair

Expansion port on the back lets you add Outfits with added functions

Review HMD's Fusion smartphone has a pogo-pin port on the back, allowing some nifty peripherals, including gaming controls, and its specs are open.

The HMD Fusion is a budget smartphone with a couple of appealing twists. The first is that the device is modular and repairable – iFixit already has guides on how to swap its battery and screen, among other things. HMD promises two years of Android updates and three years of security updates, which is slightly underwhelming, but still better than what the real bargain-basement kit offers.

The HMD Fusion is inexpensive, repairable, and can fit into smart covers. And it's black – click to enlarge

The second is that at bottom center on the back is an inconspicuous row of six recessed contacts, which form an expansion connector for cases with added functionality. So far, HMD offers four "outfits" itself. One is a simple translucent plastic case, which comes in the box. The rugged outfit upgrades the handset's modest IP54 splash resistance to IP68 water and dust resistance, and adds a push-to-talk button. It's matte black and costs £69.99 ($89.99). Two more business-oriented outfits come from partner Coppernic: a barcode reader, and a contactless card reader.

HMD rugged case with Barcode scanner – click to enlarge

Perhaps the most impressive of HMD's own add-ons is the gaming outfit, a £59.99 ($79.99) addition that turns the Fusion into a handheld console. It adds two joysticks, a D-pad, and eight control buttons, including A/B/X/Y, two shoulder buttons, and two trigger buttons. It also has its own audio socket for playing with headphones on. This grumpy old vulture is not a gamer, but the gadget sounds pretty good. The slightly odd aspect is that the Fusion is not a gaming handset. For that, we'd expect a much faster device with a higher-res display – and probably about four times the price.

Our review model is the mid-range one, with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of flash. There's also a 4 GB RAM model, and a top-spec one with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB flash. It can take dual SIMs or a SIM plus a TF card, and in a small win, unlike the Skyline phone that HMD sent us earlier, it does have a headphone socket. It doesn't have the Skyline's digital detox mode, though. GSM Arena has more complete specs than HMD's own specs page. The SoC is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 – a decent but not high-end part. The screen is a modest 720 x 1,612, but it does support 90 Hz operation – although you can limit it to 60 Hz in Settings to prolong the life of the 5,000 mAh battery. The main camera is a decent 108 MP one, with a 50 MP selfie one positioned top center in a hole in the IPS LCD display.

The Fusion's front facing cameras – click to enlarge

The final outfit is the one HMD supplied to us to try: the Flashy outfit adds an LED ring-light to the phone. It's £49.99 ($69.99) and comes in pink or blue. Stowed, the light lies flat on the back and surrounds the camera bump, but you can flip it up to provide fill-in illumination for selfies. How well HMD knows us! To gauge how strong the author's selfie game is, he only got around to joining Instagram in 2024 – solely to gain access to Threads, which is rubbish, so he never uses it. At any rate, when the phone is in the Flashy case, a new floating control appears in the camera application to enable you to turn the light on, as well as adjust its brightness and color. The integration is seamless.

Phones with connectors to allow for expansion are not a new concept. For example, back in 2017 there was the Motorola Moto Z handset, followed by three successor generations. The Register summarized the success of Moto and the Mods a couple of years later: Motorola's failed experiment is now a savvy techie's dream.

HMD is doing the right thing, though. It has a development toolkit, accessible for free, which provides detailed specifications [PDF] so that third parties can develop their own add-ons. There's also a Discord community.

Regular readers may by now have picked up on the style of phone The Reg FOSS desk reviews. We don't do lots of benchmarking – if you want that, they are easy to find – and we don't offer sample photos, on the basis that we can't see the difference in other reviews' sample pictures.

We rather like this phone. It's matte black, with squared-off sides and rounded corners. Out of its case, it's slim and feels solid, and its only decoration is 20-odd tiny black screws, and some dimples and notches for the accessories to clip onto. (As opposed to our daily-driver phone, which is decorated in mermaids and unicorns, thanks to a small daughter.) With the screen refresh rate set to "Adaptive," it feels fast and responsive. In our fairly light testing use, battery life is good – for instance, it can last about a week in battery saving mode – and it has fast charging. And of course it works fine with our preferred wired headphones.

The add-on we would really like to see for it, and which we suspect would catapult it to best-seller status, would be a case with hardware keyboard. We would give good money for something like the PinePhone's keyboard case.

The phone is available direct from HMD for £199.99 ($299.99) for the 6 GB RAM/128 GB Flash model. The 8/256 GB model is £219, but isn't listed on the US website, and there's a cheaper variant with 4 GB of RAM in some regions. ®