HMD Key – A lightweight, affordable smartphone | Hacker News Reader

HMD Key – A lightweight, affordable smartphone

hmd.com

112 pointsnamanyayg110 comments

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.

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

The specs mention 2GB of RAM: https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-key/specs?sku=1GS009MPG3001

Ah, neat. Well not neat this sucks but thanks for sharing.

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.

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) ...

> And HMD is one of the better respected mobile brands.

[citation needed]

All thanks to the Barbie phone.

https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-barbie-phone

Probably because Google, Facebook, Insta, and TikTok need to constantly observe where the phone is, what and who it’s near, what’s being said, what’s being done on device, and so on. That’s a lot sensor access, a lot of compute, and a lot of bandwidth relatively speaking. The average phone with Facebook and without has noticeable battery differences even if both phones are left untouched (personal testing, I don’t have formal numbers for that last bit).

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

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

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.

They tried with Sailfish, which is the spiritual successor of the excellent N95 OS, but alas not sufficient traction.

"They" is an interesting choice here. Two companies spun out of the wreckage of Microsoft's Nokia takeover: HMD and Jolla. HMD was Nokia's old hardware division, and they're making this device. Jolla was the software division, and they're making Sailfish.

I don’t think this would actually be too hard. Ladybird browser is making progress everyday. A browser is harder than an OS. As for market adoption, it would take someone with a ton of money to bribe device manufacturers and press the way that Microsoft used to do. So, I wouldn’t say it’s hard. Getting the right people involved would be the hard bit. How many S tier devs in the browser space are ready to gamble their futures? How many S tier OSdevs? How many completely batty billionaires are there?

> 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

I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features. Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements, and most manufacturers aren’t exactly known for being able to produce high-quality software.

There have been a couple projects that have tried to make phones based on pure Linux (Librem, Pinephone). Their performance is limited a lot by not having good CPU options, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to achieve much performance improvement on the software side either.

> I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features.

Sorry for not making it clear but I was implying exactly that. There are a ton of features that are really nice but a person spending that little on a phone probably doesn't need. I would likely even put "big touchscreen" on that list...

  Really a phone that:
  - makes phonecalls
  - has support for WhatsApp/Telegram etc even without video calls
  - has a real keyboard
  - has my banking app
  - commits to long term support and repair(5+ years preferably 10)

Would be number one on my list of things to buy because thats exactly what I want. I would absolutely still own an iPhone that I use day to day. But that cheap phone is exactly what I want when the iPhone needs to sit in a drawer for two weeks and I'm using a burner number out of town.

> Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements

They spend a lot, yes, but the results are in "useless features improvements".

There's a simple solution for that: Jolla's AppSupport (https://jolla.com/appsupport/). It enables a Linux device to run Android apps, and it's part of Jolla's Sailfish package.

Someone else already pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42674279) that HMD and Jolla are both spin-outs from Nokia, so it would seem to be a natural fusion...

Also, it bears repeating: Sailfish is a far better mobile OS than either Android or iOS. It's simple, consistent, and looks great.

Would a project similar to wine/proton help to cover that gap?

> I think the issue with these low end devices are that the duopoly on operating systems

Evidence going back over 30 years now points to the consumer computing market as only being able to support 2 platforms.

The dev costs otherwise are just too high. Heck as it is cross platform toolkits are a huge deal, because hiring 2 dev teams for 2 very different platforms is too much of a cost for most companies to bear.

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.

HMD is Nokia's successor-in-spirit

Seemed like a successor in all but spirit when I owned one of their godawful pieces of crap. I weep for the old Nokia.

The HMD phones I bought before 2020 were really great (e.g. 7+) - I kept needing to replace because got stolen or I broke screen. After Covid I bought an underpowered HMD which was really terrible - maybe they had trouble sourcing good CPUs?

With Android I find my choices are either buy a cheap shitty phone, or pay too much. It's hard to find a good value Android. At least the battery can last 2 days on some Androids (my favourite feature).

7 plus was really great

HMD is jut a random company that bought the Nokia brand. They are entirely different companies AFAIK.

HMD was founded by a bunch of ex-Nokia people. They're based in Finland, like Nokia. I assume plenty ex-Nokia people work there now, would love to know how true this is if anyone knows.

There's a smattering of old Nokia hands at HMD, but in my experience you're likely to find at least a few ex-Nokia people in almost any tech company of note out here. For all its faults as a company it birthed a generation of truly exceptional electrical and embedded engineers, and they in turn have birthed a metric ton of startups in the last decade all over the place.

It looks like HMD Global's headquarters are in Espoo, which is kind of like the Long Island of Helsinki if that makes sense. So they definitely have access to a lot of that human capital if and when they need it.

Fair, still calling it a successor just because it was founded by some employees is reaching. Nokia still exists and has just lent its brand and some patents to HMD. All the manufacturing style, innovation, basically the hallmarks of Nokia are gone. Nokia was one of the biggest companies in Finland so it is no surprise to find people working at HMD or any other tech company.

I was expecting a head mounted display that somehow unlocks things

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.

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..

I think they licensed the brand out to another manufacturer.

Yes, they licensed it to HMD. Lol

> 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.

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

Well, if they last exactly two years, they're not even lying.

> That's a criminally short support period,

No. Sincerely, GCHQ.

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

Devices? Yes. Expensive? Only if you fail in picking them. Buy an iPhone or something. I'm in Android camp, but I only buy flagships (after some bad experiences with cheap end of the phone spectrum) specifically because I can rely on them to work for 3+ years, getting updates over that period, and importantly, still being performant enough relative to contemporary software as to not be annoying to use.

I agree with GP here. In the current security-obsessed zeitgeist, 2 years of security updates is criminally low, pretty much designed to generate e-waste.

In my experience, I had to give about 100/yr to havea relatively good device foor my needs. I could choose to buy a cheap thing every year, or 600 every 6; for similar Performance. I prefer to change device no so often. 2 years is just too short.

Something like a Samsung A55 will also get 5 years of security updates. This line usually converges to around 300 Euros halfway the yearly product release cycle. There are cheaper Samsung models with long support periods, but last time I looked, they would only get quarterly security updates. The Pixel _a_ line usually also has pretty good pricing, but they tend to have weird issues/bugs.

(I'm an iPhone user, but just to point out that there are also more affordable options with longer support periods.)

iPhones have very good resale value even after 3 years, financially not that expensive! Easily good for 5 years and even then you can have decent money for it. Of course they can become pretty expensive suddenly - just when you drop them.

There is a middle ground. I spent $94 total after taxes/fees getting a Pixel 6A in August 2023. Its security updates end-of-life is July 2027. That's 4 years of security updates for only $23 more (assuming the £59 is taxes and fees included) and my pixel 6a specs blow this thing out of the water.

Yeah, but where the hell do you get it so cheap from?

It was right around the time they started phasing out the pixel 6a (stores no longer stocking new 6a) and a deal for it came up on a popular deal forum with the abbreviation "SD". (I don't want to link to the site because I think at least half the content is ads and other sponsored content).

It seems like a valid metric to pick on. Premium devices are refreshed early/short cycle their lifespans because they are purchased by customers with disposable income. Budget devices should be sold to last as that's what's important to the customers buying them.

As a counter though, I would say with 2gb of ram this device just won't be fast enough for most of its users in 3 years anyway; so although I find this a valid argument to make, a new issue pops up immediately (for me at least).

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?

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.

I wish EU at least make mandate that from the moment someone stop providing security updates they have to provide some key to unlock bootloader etc and even for those iPhone that are not supported anymore. Those devices like e.g. iPhone X are still super powerful and they could be used for other purposes if we could install linux on them. They could be a much powerful version or raspberry pi with nicer form but with touchscreen, gps, 4g, wifi, bluetooth, cameras, microphones, imu, speakers, battery, audiojack/connector.

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

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

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

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.

I do miss having a turbo button on my computer.

I wonder if they plan to monetize the boost button.

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?

It sounds like it. What a piece of shit.

I imagine the usage limit is on flash write cycles to prevent premature failure of the storage, not on how much storage space is used

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.

But probably even worse update-wise and most likely backdoored? Security should not be exclusive to the rich.

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

At this level of saturation it's not unusual to receive a pretty good one when a friend, family member or coworker upgrades. Giving the device further life and keeping it out of eWaste.

In my opinion these bottom-tier phones are just eWaste.

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.

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.

I'm envisaging something slightly less plug-and-play, more like "take your phone into the shop to get it upgraded" - which would allow for things like maintaining the waterproof sealing we've come to expect from modern phones.

I recall Nokias which eventually let even a modest drop send the battery off in one direction and the phone in another. With the 7110-style nokias turn into e-sprinklers flinging the sliding cover off too.

I liked the concept for also the reason that such 2nd hand market for modules would be great for DIY and arduino and raspberry pi like projects. Such phones could have a second life for other purposes or at least some parts could have second life.

They mentioned some difficulty and bulkiness but then I wish such concept has been applied for tablets that we change less often and have more space.

> I do wonder about the longevity of such a device.

It was loved by the Automotive industry. The cancelation lead to the use of BLE for car access (and so the data keeps flowing to Google).

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...

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.

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...

During my last Android excursion, I investigated Fairphone, but people seem to have a lot of issues with them? Like shutting frequently down during the summer due to heat, phone calls often not coming through, etc.

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.

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

> I truly feel sorry for those that will use this phone for anything that is not just calling and writing sms.

Phones in this class will freeze every other time they're receiving a call, so they're hardly suitable for even that.

In my eyes, these phones should be labeled as not suitable for advertised use and shouldn't be allowed to be sold in civilized world, as to protect the poorest from psychological damage they can cause. I'm serious. My first Android phone was like that, and it's depression through thousand papercuts.

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

Executing more bloat, than all of the code that existed when you were born

My experience with HMD ("Nokia") phones has been that they've come quite bloat-free from the factory. There are the Google apps (because no normal Android user outside of maybe China would buy a phone without those) but other than that the ROM has always been very clean.

If you load it up with Tiktok and Instagram and whatever else likes to run in the background all the time, it'll certainly be bogged down, but HMD phones themselves are normally clean when you buy them*

*=unless you buy them through a carrier which customises the OS, like people in the US often seem to choose for some reason. But that's because the carrier loads those phones with bloat, not because HMD does.

Interesting, which HMD models have you used and have you used Spotify or Youtube with bluetooth headphones on them? I wonder how they perform.

The Cortex-A53 is certainly a respectable processor within its design constraints. It is from 2012, and I think it is either the smallest or the second-smallest implementation of AArch64 that Arm have designed. It is very power-efficient, and that was the design goal. You definitely can make an SoC that only has “efficiency” cores, and it can even run Android, but putting it in a smartphone indicates that pure manufacturing cost is your only design consideration.

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

Like a raspberry pi 3?

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.

Most of my phone's RAM is going towards Firefox and maybe a few messengers that stay resident. The rest is all cache just in case I want to switch back to an app I opened yesterday.

Running Android on 512MB is a thing of the past but if websites could stop bloating themselves up with Javascript modules and megabytes of images, this phone would probably be fine as a daily driver for someone who doesn't use their phone all that often.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

That's what Play Store is for.

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.

> not the richest nations of the Commonwealth.

Aren't there any poor in Britain ?

Sure, but I'd guess even poor people allocate slightly more money than that for smartphones.

>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 ;)

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.

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.

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

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

Is there a similar product that works in the USA?

There are an endless number of budget phones with essentially identical specs to this, yes.

Maybe a first phone for kids?

A dumbphone might be a better choice if you don't want them to turn in to screenkids.

My recent hmd/nokia disappointment was a flip dumb-phone. Annoyingly it has a facebook app that cant be deleted, and some games that auto-charge your phone bill after a few plays. If they really try to ban smart-phones for kids, then we are going to need a better definition of a dumb-phone. Bring back the old Nokia!

Low-end phone with "AI Camera" on the cover? Yeah, no.

Is that a satire or parody site? Definitely feels like it.

Android? Meh…

Android Go, actually.

Teams, Slack, etc. won't work well (or at all). WhatsApp, Skype only in a limited mode.

Why is a budget android phone the #2 post on hn?

This doesn't feel organic at all.

> Why is a budget android phone the #2 post on hn?

Not everybody pays more than 200€ on an RCE device.

> This doesn't feel organic at all.

I think the plastic is an organic material. /s

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