Review: HMD Skyline

The number one Android smartphone feature I've been looking forward to in 2024 is Qi2. This is the new wireless charging standard that enables a MagSafe-like magnetic charging system, much like what's available on modern iPhones. It allows you to magnetically pop on a battery pack, or magnetically stick your phone to a Qi2 charger for perfect alignment and faster wireless charging speeds. It even opens up other accessories, like magnetic tripods, camera accessories, and my favorites: magnetic car docks and bike mounts.

You might then understand my frustration when every Android phone announced this year has yet to feature the new charging standard. Even the recently announced Google Pixel 9 series still uses the older Qi standard. The exception? HMD's Skyline, a new device from the company that previously only made Nokia-branded phones. It's the world's first Qi2-certified Android phone on the market, but that's not the only thing that makes it unique—it's also user-repairable and comes in a hot neon-pink color (!).

Magnetic Android

The first thing I did after setting up the Skyline was pop it on a MagSafe wireless charger I had lying around. It attached magnetically! Hooray! Except it didn't charge. Weird. I then took it to a normal wireless charger and had no luck. I tried it on more than five wireless chargers, some a mix of Qi and others MagSafe-certified, and the phone didn't recharge on any of them. Cue my disappointment.

The Qi2 standard is supposed to be backward compatible with Qi, meaning your older wireless chargers should still be able to recharge Qi2 phones. So what gives? Well, it turns out the magnetic wireless charging coils may not line up with all Qi chargers, MagSafe or not. Some Qi chargers will work (HMD shared a preliminary list of several), but more likely than not, you may have to buy a Qi2 charger. I asked Nomad to send me its new Qi2 Stand and the Skyline started recharging instantly when I plopped it on. I don't love this limitation but at least there's a solution.

All is not rosy. Even if the Skyline magnetically sticks to this Qi2 wireless charging stand, the strength of the magnetic connection isn't great. The phone started tilting to the side and, on its own, rotated horizontally because it's slightly top-heavy. Compare this to my Pixel 8 Pro with a Peak Design MagSafe case, which stays perfectly still on the same charger because the magnets in the case are much stronger.

This makes me concerned about when I'd want to attach other magnetic accessories to the Skyline—will they just fall off that much easier? I'm happy that I finally get the magnetic benefits of Qi2 in an Android phone, but I hope this is just a lackluster implementation and not a sign of things to come.

Standard Android

The Skyline is an otherwise perfectly fine Android phone. I like its rectangular design, hard flat edges and all. The neon pink is especially fun, and I'm glad HMD is bold enough to offer loud and proud colors. The whole thing is a bit slippery though. There's no headphone jack, but HMD does offer a microSD card slot to go with 256 GB of internal storage.

It runs pretty well. This is thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7S Gen 2 chipset with 8 GB of RAM. I've been using it for a few weeks with no issues hopping between apps and juggling multiple tasks. It can feel sluggish in some moments, but never frustratingly so. However, its performance is more in line with smartphones that cost $300 to $400, like the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus or the Samsung Galaxy A35, and benchmark results corroborated that. The Google Pixel 8A, which costs the same as the Skyline, trounced it.

The Skyline has a sharp and smooth 6.55-inch pOLED display with a 144-Hz screen refresh rate. By default, the phone is set to an “adaptive” refresh rate, which goes up to only 120 frames per second. If you want the full 144-Hz experience, you'll have to manually set it. My only qualm is that on superbright days, you may have to squint to read the screen.

Battery life is nothing special; it's a 4,600-mAh cell and I expected a beefier battery considering the phone's thickness. I routinely had to plug it in around 10 or 11 pm, with 15 percent left. That's with roughly five and a half hours of screen-on time. On lighter usage days, I usually ended with 50 percent, so it's not out of the realm of possibility. I did run into a bug where even with Battery Protection turned off (it limits your charging to 80 percent to protect the longevity of the cell), it sometimes wouldn't go past 80 percent. A restart finally fixed this.

Oh, and there's a special button on the left side of the Skyline. Right now it's customizable, so you can have it open an app or trigger a shortcut like a flashlight. Later this year, HMD will issue a software update to add Detox Mode, which you can trigger with this button. You can set a “soft lock,” which disables apps and notifications for a period or until you reenable them again. A “hard lock” is a bit more extreme and will require a restart to get out of it. It's a more powerful version of Android's Do Not Disturb functions, but I'm interested to see how effective it can be.

HMD has stuffed the Skyline with a triple-camera system. That's pretty unusual at this price, especially since one of the cameras is a 50-MP 4X telephoto. It's joined by a 108-MP main camera and a 13-MP ultrawide, and the selfie camera is 50 MP. It's a versatile system, and the quality of the photos is decent. It doesn't have the speed to capture fast-moving objects like the Pixel 8A, but you can get some shareable images.

The photos from the 4X zoom camera aren't all that sharp even during the daytime; God forbid you use it at night. That's a shame because I love telephoto cameras; I found myself using the 4X shooter the most but then got disappointed by the results. The main camera is far more reliable, even in low light, and the selfie camera can deliver reasonably sharp photos with nice colors.

Repairable Android

The HMD Skyline's top-line feature is that it's user-repairable. You'll likely hear a lot more about user-repairable gadgets in the coming months, largely due to new right-to-repair laws in Europe and several US states. That said, HMD has partnered with iFixit to offer parts for cheap and guides on how to repair and replace certain components.

For example, you can replace the phone's battery for $25, or swap the screen for $95. The repair is designed to be easy too, requiring only a few tools like a T3 screwdriver. (These tools are included in iFixit kits and the parts will be available for seven years.) The cost of this repairability might be the water resistance rating: IP54. That means it'll be fine in the rain, but do not submerge the Skyline underwater.

It's great that this phone is user-repairable, but HMD is still promising only two Android OS updates and three years of security updates. It currently runs Android 14, so that means it will not get any more version updates after Android 16 in 2025. What a bummer. HMD says the reasons people don't hold onto their phones for longer aren't linked to update policies, but repairability. But now that you can repair this device for as long as seven years, maybe the only reason you'll replace it is because it no longer gets updates after three years. It's perplexing.

The HMD Skyline is a decent Android phone with some quirks, but it's only in the limelight because of its repairability and Qi2 charging capabilities. Without those two features, it's frankly a bit overpriced. The lackluster update policy and the crowded midrange phone market make it tough to outright recommend at $500. If you want a good cheap phone, consider options like the Pixel 8A and Nothing Phone (2a) Plus, or even the OnePlus 12R. If you desperately want Qi2, well, you may have to wait until 2025 for the next Android with it.