HMD Key – A lightweight, affordable smartphone

[Tepix]

This is a phone with a limited version of Android (Android Go) and only 2GB of RAM which isn't enough. It has a slow CPU, it lacks 5G connectivity which is more and more important just to have good reception. It comes with at most 2 years of security updates. It has 32GB of storage which quickly fill up if you take pictures every now and then.

If you can afford it, get something like the Samsung A52 5G with 7 years of updates and 6GB or 8GB of RAM. If that's too expensive, get one from the list when it's on sale: https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=umtsover&v=e&hloc=uk&sort=p&bl1...

These are recently released phones with 6GB RAM or more and Android 14+ starting at £99. 6GB of RAM means you can use your phone for a couple of years without it getting super slow.

[_heimdall]

Its limited for sure, but that may not be a problem for everyone. I've been using a Cat S22 flip phone without any real issue. It has a Snapdragon 215 and 2GB of RAM.

Don't get me wrong, the S22 is limited for sure and that's part of what I use it for (I need a rugged device to carry around our land, I don't need a glass slab). Android is noticeably slower than a more recent Pixel device but its totally usable.

[thisislife2]

You are ofcourse right that there are better specced devices in this price band. And HMD is one of the better respected mobile brands. Two GB is also good enough for basic telephony (calls, messaging, video chats etc.) and for various kinds of "consumption" (music, youtube, browsing etc.). Many popular older apps can run fine on it too. Honestly, when Android 5 - 8 could run on 1 GB or less, on single or dual core cpus, quite well, I don't frankly understand how we've come to this point that we now need a new OS (Android Go) to run on "limited resources" devices that have more ram and cpu (cores) ...

[amelius]

Maybe it is perfect for people who want to limit their smartphone use?

[aitchnyu]

I had two A series fail on me. The repair shop recommends Oneplus/Realme.

[saagarjha]

2 GB of swap. I don’t think RAM was mentioned.

[jpc0]

I think the issue with these low end devices are that the duopoly on operating systems makes it impossible to develop a competing operating system that get's any traction.

I am 100% sure you, as a manufacturer, could develop a very lightweight shim over a linux or BSD kernel that has significantly better performance than Android does. It would however be a universal flop regardless of how useable it is since critical apps like WhatsApp/Telegram/banking would not get ported to that platform ever.

That effectively leaves you with needing a capable web browser and well... Even Firefox with every form of adblocker enable regularly chews up 2-3 GB of ram for me, at least on desktop. And building a competitive web browser to Chromium is an absurd endeavour for a cheap cell manufacturer.

[pbhjpbhj]

HMD is a mobile phone brand; "Key" is a line of phones.

I thought it was something like a YubiKey, but it appears instead to be a really cheap phone running Android Go.

[seanalltogether]

I tried a relatively cheap nokia android phone a couple years ago and I'll never do it again. The camera would do this thing where you would take a photo, the screen would show that the shutter had snapped, but your actual photo would be whatever was happening a second later. I ended up with 10% of my photos being a blurry picture of the floor.

[saidinesh5]

Yup.. and in some of the cheaper phones I have tried out, there was a mismatch with camera flash timing and when the phone actually captured the image.. it didn't happen in the main camera app but happened in every other app.. so most of my night pictures were just black... It would have been nicer if there were fewer android phones around so the manufacturers actually spend time testing them out..

[brightball]

I think they licensed the brand out to another manufacturer.

[hddherman]

> Another key area this device hasn’t cut back on is its security. Quarterly security updates for 2 years² will help keep everything safe and sound.

That's a criminally short support period, and a great way to produce even more e-waste.

[flas9sd]

after june 2025 producers cannot sell a phone in the EU market with such a short software support timespan

https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/...

> availability of operating system upgrades [..] at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model

[madeofpalk]

And it's even worse

> ²From the global launch date of HMD Key.

So if you buy it in 12 months time it'll only recieve 1 year of security updates.

How long do you reckon this will be on the market for?

[asadhaider]

Agreed, this would be a hard no and makes me think if feature updates will be on an even shorter lifecycle.

The about us page even states "We make phones that last for years" as their company quest[0].

[0] https://www.hmd.com/en_int/about

[exe34]

would be nice if the EU would mandate something like lineage os being available from day 1 for a device. manufacturer would have to provide resources to make sure it works before release.

[politelemon]

Expensive devices turns to ewaste in shorter time frames for reasons other than support. This is a poor metric to pick on.

[ptx]

Maybe they expect the flash wear out after 2 years, since they're using it for swap.

[hulitu]

> That's a criminally short support period,

No. Sincerely, GCHQ.

[commandersaki]

Strange to see they're marketing virtual memory swap space like it's a good thing.

[mkl]

And like it's an innovation.

They also have this footnote:

> Using memory extension (virtual RAM) requires enough storage space. To protect the storage, memory extension is automatically and permanently disabled once 90% of the usage limit is reached.

So you get to 90% (of 32GB) one time, and swap no longer works even if you clear space?

[unsupp0rted]

Just press the "boost" button any time you want your phone to not be terrible. I'm not kidding- that's on their landing page.

[throwaway519]

A Redmi 13C with 6G RAM (+2G), Octacore 2.2 GHz, 5G, costs £65 new. Charger included.

That's a budget phone. Seems a better bang all around for the extra £6.

[scrlk]

Probably better value to buy a used or refurbished phone, rather than a new phone at the extreme end of the budget category.

[Retr0id]

It's a shame we haven't figured out how to do "modular" smartphones where the motherboard can be swapped out, like with framework laptops. I'd be happy with a phone from 10 years ago on all axes except CPU/GPU/RAM and corresponding security updates.

[suprjami]

Google's Project Ara was this. A modular smartphone where you could swap any component out with plug-in modules.

I met a Google employee at a conference in 2016 and he let me play with his Ara for a bit. It felt fantastic. I'd have bought one in an instant.

Google cancelled the project.

I do wonder about the longevity of such a device. I still have all my Android phones from the very first HTC G1 and anything with a removable component feels pretty rattly now.

When Nokia 5110 were on the market and you'd owned one for a while, you needed to pack the battery with double sided tape so the contacts didn't disconnect, causing the phone to power off.

I guess that sort of thing is why Google binned the idea.

[mtmail]

https://shop.fairphone.com/fairphone-5 has 5 year warranty. Parts are replaceable but there's no choice of parts, with a bit more tools one would be able to do the same replacements on an iphone. https://www.fairphone.com/en/2023/08/30/is-the-fairphone-5-t...

[mjburgess]

I think modularity made more sense in an area where significant performance gains happened in hardware every 6 months. It makes very little sense with a 6+ year horizon -- at that point you're upgrading everything anyway.

Now, modularity is really a right-to-repair issue, not anything that provides a meaningful benefit to upgrading. And for that things just need to be "modular" enough to repair by a specialist.

[saidinesh5]

Let alone user swappable soc and ram.. we even lost the modularity that came with micro sdcards and user replaceable batteries in so most phones these days...

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Yet another phone with Android Go edition, four very slow Cortex-A53 cores (https://www.unisoc.com/en_us/home/TZNSJ-9832E-7), 2GB of RAM (https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-key/specs?sku=1GS009MPG3001), 2GB of “virtual RAM” (swap space)…

Destined to become immediate e-waste like all the other phones in its class. Wanna bet that it can only run 32-bit apps despite having a 64-bit CPU, because it's so memory-starved? That's extremely common in this segment.

The “Upgrade without overspending” pitch is rather bizarre considering that the specs on low-end phones seemingly do not change. Five years ago they were selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM, today they are selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM, in five years the phone manufacturers will have somehow continued twisting Google's hand to be able to continue selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM.

[amarcheschi]

I truly feel sorry for those that will use this phone for anything that is not just calling and writing sms. I've had relatives with slow phones, and especially if old and not tech savvy, they click, wait, click again because nothing happened. Then, the feedback of the first click arrives, but the 2nd click will now click something different because what is being displayed has now changed. So they go back, but it's so slow they have to wait and press back again (...). And so, the eternal cycle of slow mobile phones restarts

[mherkender]

The cores aren't slow so much as software was designed for more powerful devices. It's a shame, really.

[ZiiS]

Four cores, each with more computing power then existed in the known universe when I was born.

[usrusr]

What happened to RAM use? Ignoring gaming (which a large sunbset of the market never ever does), phones these days are doing exactly the same things they were doing back when 512MB was considered a generous amount of RAM. It feels as if Google deliberately ended all RAM frugality in platform updates to get ever bigger ad delivery machines into pockets.

[bobmcnamara]

Like a raspberry pi 3?

[wormik]

I don't understand why people who are clearly not the ICP have the urge to comment. I think that market will prove whether it's a good thing.

[szundi]

Actually this is a place that is open to anyone's opinion - and that makes sense. People from border areas with the one of the discussion can give alternative insights. Of course digging relevant ones out of 1k comments are a challenge.

[beefnugs]

I don't often trust tech opinions, but when I do, it is those from the insane clown posse

[YoooThere]

I wouldn't want to use this as my main device, but I might get one just to use as the display for a DJI controller. At the moment I'm using an old Samsung S8 with a burnt-in screen and no updates.

[throwaway55479]

Affordable yes, but not sustainable.

FYI, You can now have 6 years of major android upgrades for 200$ with the A16 [1]

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13346&idPhone...

[Retr0id]

I suspect most people here aren't going to daily-drive one of these, but there's another use - testing how your app runs on low-end devices.

[hulitu]

> testing how your app runs on low-end devices.

That's what Play Store is for.

[KeplerBoy]

weird targeted regions. I thought those phones would be mostly sold in the poorest of the poor regions, not the richest nations of the Commonwealth.

[hulitu]

> not the richest nations of the Commonwealth.

Aren't there any poor in Britain ?

[fuzzfactor]

>just £59 from the 2nd of January in the UK, Australia, and the New Zealand

That's a pretty low price but outside of UK and AU, only available in the "newest" of Zealands ;)

[cyp0633]

A Redmi 14C offers 4GB RAM, MTK G81 SoC, for 499 CNY (about 66 EUR, slightly more expensive than the HMD one) in China. It would be a strong competitor if it's that cheap in Europe as well, but sadly no. The price is almost doubled. That said, it's still a phone you shouldn't buy if you can afford a better one.

[butz]

Where did all small budget phones had gone? I don't need a tablet that does not fit anywhere and has huge camera bump that does not lie flat on the table.

[lifestyleguru]

My current smartphone has "cloud camera". I'll wait for smartphone with "blockchain camera", thanks.

[mjd]

This sounds great, except I don't live in those places.

Is there a similar product that works in the USA?