HMD Skyline review: the Lumia design makes a comeback

The HMD Skyline may have gone retro in the looks department, but technologically, it’s cutting-edge. With its easy repairability, it stands out from the rest of the smartphone crowd. Its lack of long-term support for updates, however, is totally at odds with this.

Replaceable battery, USB-C port and display

The Skyline’s release sees HMD continue its partnership with spare part store and repair manual provider iFixit – an arrangement that began while HMD was still operating as Nokia. Its «Gen2 repairability» will supposedly make home repairs even easier than with the Nokia G22.

There’s a Torx screw (T4) on the bottom edge of the Skyline. If you rotate it about a quarter, you can lift the back of the phone. You’ll then be able to slip a pick into the gap and pry off the back entirely. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have access to the battery (which isn’t glued down) and be able to unscrew other T4 screws to replace the USB-C port or display. The smartphone doesn’t get by entirely without plug connectors, so I’d recommend you read the relevant repair manual carefully.

Replacement parts will supposedly be available from iFixit for at least seven years. To give you an example, a replacement screen costs 95 euros, with the toolkit necessary to repair it coming in at 25 euros. Alternatively, you can buy the entire set of tools:

Return of the Lumia design

Before HMD took over manufacturing Nokia smartphones, Microsoft made them with the Windows Phone operating system. Although the project ended unsuccessfully over ten years ago, the Nokia Lumia design has probably stuck in many people’s minds. The edges of the HMD Skyline’s display in particular are strongly reminiscent of the Lumia 920.

The 6.55-inch OLED display has a resolution of 2,400 × 1,080 pixels. This equates to a pixel density of 319 ppi, resulting in a sharp image for the human eye. The refresh rate reaches up to 144 hertz. Its maximum brightness of 1,000 nits is high enough for the display to be used in sunlight.

The HMD Skyline’s removable back is made of plastic, while the frame consists entirely of aluminium. Since the phone is IP54-certified, it’s protected from splashes of water.

A button for your favourite commands

One special little feature the HMD Skyline has is its extra button on the left-hand side. In the settings menu, you can assign it two commands from a sprawling list of functions. You can distinguish between them by double-tapping or pressing and holding. Fresh out of the box, pressing the button turns on the torch and plays music. However, you can also open apps, perform system actions such as taking a screenshot, or open the camera.

You can also select an extra function for the On/Off button in the settings menu. However, this can only be carried out via double-tapping. By default, pressing and holding the button activates Google Assistant. The only thing you can reassign to this is the Off menu, which displays the restart and emergency button options.

Powerful enough, though slightly slower than expected

HMD has fitted the Skyline with the mid-range Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset, giving it enough power for day-to-day situations. What’s more, the smartphone has 5G, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 The processor sports eight cores. Like the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, the efficiency cores clock higher.

In benchmark tests, the Skyline is on par with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G. The only outlier proves to be the PC Mark Work 3.0 office benchmark, a test designed to evaluate the performance of everyday tasks. Both smartphones fitted with the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 perform slightly worse than the nominally older Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 in the HTC U23 Pro. However, the cheaper Nothing Phone (2a), fitted with the Dimensity 7200 Pro, beats all three other smartphones – at least in Geekbench.

My test device has eight gigabytes of RAM – just like the Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G from Xiaomi, which I’ve also reviewed. In Switzerland, however, HMD only sells the Skyline with 12 gigabytes of RAM. Basically, the test results should be better than this. Speaking of Switzerland, if you buy a Skyline from our Swiss shop, you could get one of 100 free Nokia 3210s.

With 12 gigabytes of RAM, the Skyline always has 256 gigabytes of storage space. Eight gigabytes of RAM gets you 128 or 256, depending on the model you go for. Regardless of the memory size, you can always expand it with a microSD card.

The first smartphone with Qi2

The HMD Skyline is the first smartphone to have the new Qi2 wireless charging standard. While the previous Qi1 standard could only transmit 7.5 watts of power, Qi2 manages up to 15 watts. However, I don’t have a suitable charger I could use to assess that. Perhaps my colleague Lorenz Keller will now change his mind about Qi2 being a flop.

Using the USB-C cable included with the phone, you can charge the Skyline with up to 33 watts. A full charge takes up to an hour and a half, but the battery can go from 20 to 80 per cent in 30 minutes. Though the Skyline doesn’t come with a power adapter, widely used fast charging standards are supported. As a result, most power adapters can deliver full power during the charging process.

At 4,600 mAh, the HMD Skyline’s battery is slightly smaller than a typical battery. On average, the most up-to-date smartphones right now tend to have a capacity of around 5,000 mAh. In the PC Mark Work 3.0 battery test, I recorded the Skyline’s battery life as 8 hours, 34 minutes at full display brightness. This actually means it’s four minutes better than the Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G, whose battery boasts over ten per cent more capacity. Beyond this direct comparison, the Skyline falls into the average range for smartphone battery life.

Serviceable cameras can be a disappointment too

HMD has kitted out the Skyline with three rear cameras. The main camera has a 108-megapixel sensor (Samsung Isocell HM6), and is complemented by a 50-megapixel telephoto camera and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera. There’s also a 50-megapixel selfie camera on the front.

In all cameras except the ultra-wide-angle, HMD uses so-called pixel-binning. This involves combining several neighbouring pixels into one, supposedly increasing light sensitivity and, ultimately, image quality. In addition, the image files end up being smaller than if they were actually taken at 50 or 108 megapixels.

A whole lot of yellow

The HMD Skyline mixes a noticeably high amount of yellow into its images. Too much for my taste. Apple has a penchant for yellow too, but theirs is slightly subtler. Photo details look accurate enough when viewed on the phone itself or on social media. You only begin to notice imperfections when the photo’s at 100 per cent magnification.

If I capture the sun in a photo, the Skyline copes well with contrasts. That said, the colours seem slightly more lacklustre. In reality, the sky was bluer and the grass greener.

Good ultra-wide-angle camera, middling telephoto camera

The ultra-wide-angle camera does a better job of rendering colours than the main camera. I don’t think the sky’s rich blue or the lush green of the grass are exaggerated – in fact, they’re close to reality. The ultra-wide-angle camera can’t utilise pixel-binning because of its resolution. Even so, it offers a similarly good level of detail to the main camera.

HMD is full of praise for the telephoto camera, which supposedly offers 3x optical and 4x lossless zoom. One of the things that make this possible is AI Capture Fusion technology, designed to allow the main camera to help add details to zoomed-in images. However, it doesn’t yet work as promised.

Photos taken with the 2x and 3x zooms look good on the phone, and even on a 27-inch monitor. The thing is, that’s at a maximum magnification of 43 per cent. If you look at the full-size images, you see a lot of artefacts and barely any details. The further away the subject is, the worse this effect gets. Not ideal when the whole point of a zoom is to shoot faraway things.

Fraught with significant quality losses, the 4x zoom gives you an impression of what the other snaps look like at 100-per-cent magnification. It’s not pretty. With that, it’s clear there’s no point in using the 20x digital zoom.

Portraits are practically perfect

Portrait mode delivers good photos, but the details are worthy of criticism. Colour rendering, detail accuracy and blurring are fine on the whole. It even blurs my arm in the foreground. My beard, however, looks too angular for my liking. Looking at the top of my head and my glasses, it’s apparent the software has some trouble distinguishing between people and backgrounds.

Oil painting-like night shots

Using night mode and a little residual light, the Skyline conjures up beautiful shots in the dark. They’re better lit, with more detail than those taken in automatic mode. That being said, they’re far from natural-looking. Flicking through them, I feel like I’m looking at oil paintings.

Passable selfies

Although I’ve switched off all the beauty filters, my face looks like it’s in soft focus in selfies. Or is it because the shots are lacking detail? The 50-megapixel sensor shouldn’t really show that. A negative that strikes me when it comes to colour rendering is the faded black of my T-shirt.

The selfie camera’s also equipped with portrait mode. As far as colours and detail are concerned, it deserves the same criticism I’ve levelled at regular selfies taken on the camera. Mind you, the software does recognise my glasses correctly this time, showing them in sharp focus.

The selfie camera’s reliant on good lighting to produce decent photos.

Detox mode and lack of long-term support for updates

The HMD Skyline comes with Android 14 installed. Its user interface features monochrome app icons on the start page, but not for every app. In the main menu, they’re in colour as usual. Four advertising apps also come pre-installed, but these can be removed without much effort.

One of the Skyline features that HMD’s been touting isn’t yet available on my test device: detox mode. Nevertheless, I’ve seen it before. The manufacturer’s keen to help people make a conscious effort to use their devices less often, and this mode is supposed to enable that. You can set apps to disappear completely and not send any notifications when detox mode is activated. What’s more, you can block certain contacts from reaching you during detox time, and vice versa.

Before activating detox mode, you can set how long you want it to curtail your screen time. It can’t be deactivated during that timeframe. In an emergency, however, detox mode can be shut off by restarting the phone.

HMD plans to give the Skyline two major operating system updates and deliver security updates for three years. Which is slightly at odds with the fact that spare parts for the phone are to last significantly longer. Although the phone won’t immediately become unusable without updates, the longer these security gaps remain, the less secure the device will be to use. HMD says most people only plan to use their device for two to three years anyway, and lengthening the update period would increase costs.