What is special about this? Does it cost $20? Is it a cheap smart phone (why do they call it a hybrid phone?) targetting India (mentioning of cricket)?
Ok, this is kinda cool. In case you wanted to read the actual specs: https://www.hmd.com/en_in/hmd-touch-4g/specs?sku=1GE001CPG30... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Touch_4G RTOS Touch on a Unisoc T127... that's cool. Amazed they can get the price that low.
You know it's an India focused device when the top selling point is "Check the cricket results" ;)
This is a odd one. I don't think it can compete with cheap android phones.
But I would love an android in small form factor like this. Can live without hi-res display and multiple cameras, if they can get the phone down to this size.
IMO, Xperia mini was the perfect phone.
This is an odd little device. It seems you can only call other express chat users? it's reminiscent of cellphone systems from the old old days like Nextel walkie talkies. Also I see its available in India only and given the feature restrictions perhaps it's meant as an ultra low end device ?
If HMD came out with something that was optimized to the nth degree for whatsapp calls, that might be interesting, but even then I wonder how cheap it would need to be to compete with budget androids.
There looks to be an express chat app for iPhone and Android as well.
I assure you it can do regular calls and texting on the public telephony grid.
Without WhatsApp support it will not go far.
> Without WhatsApp support it will not go far.
Speaking of which, it is bizarre how the tables have turned. Whatsapp used to support everything under the sun... But now it is all Android and iPhone
To be fair there's nothing else left under this sun.
It's a chicken and egg problem tho, whatsapp doesn't support smaller platforms, and smaller platforms can't grow without app support. I remember that the uptake of Windows Phone 7 and early versions of 8 was pretty low partly because whatsapp didn't support that OS.
I know, but my comment was more along the lines of Windows Phone 7 coming out in 2010 and whatsapp being available a year later, and of whatsapp not having a native app for Sailfish
They could do Telegram at least, which has a non-zero user base (not sure about India, though, which seems to be their target market), and supports third party clients. Rolling their own chat app is... well, good luck with that.
Why to put front and center that chat app? I mean, is not something that makes it unique, if the app itself can run in android and iOS then it is just a chat app, with far less users than i.e. whatsapp.
At first I thought that it was an AI app, and reading more could find why that would be innovative, but no, just a chat app targeting the same phone users and the ones willing to install the app in other phone brands.
My guess is because this is not an Android phone and it is important to be able to chat with Android and iPhone users. The real question is why would iPhone and Android users install this app?
https://www.hmd.com/en_in/about-hybrid-phones
Edit: Requiring Google Play login to use this express chat app is pretty stupid in my opinion. Why do apps require Google Play login? Especially a Chinese app? I am on an Android phone with Google play. I am just not signed in to Google play. I installed this app with Aurora store. The app simply throws me back to Play Store which tells me to sign in. Why?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moon.expre...
This is nothing new. It's a dumb-phone with a touchscreen. There were quite a few examples back in the day in the late 00s.
It seems particularly similar to the short lived Microsoft Kin phones from 2010.
Considering how bad the Windows Phone ecosystem was, the smartphones were not much better...
I recently found my old Nokia Lumia 800.it behaved rather smoothly with the metro ui, ofcourse nothing worked aside phone calls
The device came out about a year ago: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-HMD-Touch-4G-is-an-all-scr...
It looks like it's still India-exclusive. I haven't heard much about it online, and with a dedicated chat app I would've expected to if it was a success. Did it bomb?
A dedicated app that's only compatible with itself and only have miniscule install count means nothing. I tried downloading it and it only even support 4 countries prefix at the moment. It's also not that cheaper compared to "proper" smartphone from other brands in that area. Notebookcheck says it's launched with 3999 rupees while I see Itel Zeno 10 is just 4769 rupees. With India's unskilled labor minimum monthly wage about 20000 rupees I don't think anyone would care about the price difference.
the hardware design reminds me of the Nokia Lumias, a black rounded display glass within a straight squared colored unibody
https://m.gsmarena.com/nokia_lumia_920-pictures-4967.php
the good old days
Reminds me a lot of my old Nokia 525 with windows. Great form factor for running and hiking. If this one got GPS I would buy it. But it's up against excellent full function phones like bluebox and veelo from China which make stunningly good small phones.
Ideal hardware, garbage software (can't unlock HMD bootloaders)
The front of the device in the illustrations looks like the LG Fireweb from 2013, that ran Firefox OS. Good old times.
Which is now KaiOS by the way.
Do it support Wifi hotspot? I will buyit instantly.
The linked page says that it can be a hotspot.
Something like this could do without the selfie cam, or bezels in general.
Think of it as the front cam you need to make video calls ... I think the bezels is so that the corners of the phone doesn't poke you when you keep it in your pocket (it's a small device - smaller than even feature phones).
giving 4g. they are not even trying anymore
4G? WTF..
After GSM and UMTS shutdown, LTE is the foundation for IoT and entry level mobile connectivity. 5G RedCap coverage is not widespread enough and the chipset is not cheap enough.
Do you live in a 5G-only region? If not, what's the problem?
There isn't many (if any) countries with only 5G, although most countries have shutdown both 2G and 3G networks, with the 4G shutdown likely within the next decade.
Not supporting 5G limits this devices longevity, although at the price point and Indian market focus, I think its acceptable.
> It’s not your old keypad phone.
It's not your phone at all if you don't control the software.. even old keypad phones were often flashable, but HMD is working hard to make sure you have no say what software is running on your smartphone.
They couldn't find a stock photo for the selfie cam instead of using AI slop?
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4G? In 2026? Good luck having no tower reception. 4G barely works anymore.
4G is currently the dominant mobile data network with the best coverage.
Yeah in your dreams maybe. I'm often seeing zero bars, asking others if they have any signal only to have them show me a full 5G signal. New towers aren't backwards compatible, and the bandwidth has been largely reduced.
I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing with me about this. 4G currently has much better coverage than 5G; that's just a fact. I'm sure "4G barely works anymore" is true for you, but you don't represent the world, much less India, where this phone is sold.
> New towers aren't backwards compatible, and the bandwidth has been largely reduced.
Yup.
In tech-speak there is 5G NSA (Non-Standalone Architecture) and 5G SA (Standalone Architecture).
5G NSA is a kludge, it is 5G radios operating on a legacy 4G core. Inherently backwards compatible.
5G SA is 5G radios on 5G core. Clearly not backwards compatible.
5G SA is the preferred route for good reason:
1. It delivers reduced power consumption at both operator and user-device level
2. It delivers improved latency and bandwidth at both operator and user-device levelNSA can be rolled out with almost nothing more than a firmware update. For any existing carrier network, it was the obvious place to start 5G rollout.
If you're building new towers, things change, obviously. That said, a lot of industrial/IoT hardware still requires 4G so it's not entirely unreasonable to deploy 4G in new coverage areas.
In other words - noone in real life is deploying 5G only infrastructure right now and won't for awhile.
MSR base stations are the norm in the industry, not a rarity.
They can replace 2G/3G IoT with LTE, but cannot with 5G (due to energy consumption).
5G RedCap is the solution, but that will need new infrastructure and chipset. LTE will stay at least for another ten years.
Did you mix up 4G with 3G/2G?
> Did you mix up 4G with 3G/2G?
Most operators have switched off both 3G and 2G by now.
2G is still active in a few areas as a low-speed, long-range fallback while 3G is being shut down.
This is why I'm asking, because noone is shutting down 4G anywhere. And 5G actually has LESS range than 4G.
4G is ending up as the replacement to 2G as the base network. I suspect 5G networks will be shut down before 4G ones given IoT devices are largely setting on the low power variants of LTE.
These fucking cookie settings I swear lmao
> Currently only available in India
Closes tab
I suspected as much after their first use case for cloud services was cricket results.
Perhaps the limitation to whatever express chat is isn’t a dealbreaker in India.
This phone cost about one-fifth of India's minimum monthly wage, while proper new Android cost one-third of monthly wage. My country's economy is somewhat in the same ballpark as India and I doubt anyone I know would buy this. In an r/dumbphones reviews, comments by Indians shows nobody cares about these devices aside from those buying weird devices for curiosity sake.
₹4,199 it seems, which is about $45.
This is perfect. I've been looking for a burner phone for when I'm in Guayaquil. Something I wouldn't mind losing in a robbery.
The little print at the end says "Currently only available in India."
Reminds me a bit of HMD's KaiOS feature phones but this is apparently Android?
> The little print at the end says "Currently only available in India."
I think that was made obvious by the big thing on the marketing website scroll about checking cricket scores.
No, it uses RTOS Touch. Looks like HMD/Nokia gave up on KaiOS a few years ago.
It says "Small phone".
And it is indeed smaller than most smartphones. Apple never made a small smartphone, presumably because they need the big screen for their vending-machine-in-your-pocket to sell more content.
Apple struggles to sell budget models of their phones, everyone wants at least the standard version. Why would they try to sell an even tinier phone than the SE? No one will buy it. The Apple Watch is a tiny device with its own SIM but that's not a phone, it's a smartwatch so its really an accessory to your phone.
many people await the return of the iphone mini...
Yes you still see so many around. They might not have sold enough by Apple standards but they still sold in huge absolute numbers.
I mean, depending on what you mean by "small smartphone", the early models definitely count (3.5"-4" diagonal). They were huge screens for their time, but nowadays everything's a phablet so they look tiny by comparison.