Review: HMD Vibe

HMD, the Finnish company that has been licensing the Nokia brand name to make cheapo and midrange Android phones for more than 7 years, is finally striking it out on its own. Now you'll start seeing cheapo and midrange phones with the branding “HMD,” which stands for Human Mobile Devices. (The company says it plans on continuing its relationship with Nokia.)

A few of these devices have already hit European markets—the HMD Pulse series—but the US is getting the HMD Vibe. It's a $150 smartphone, so don't expect anything groundbreaking. It omits a few too many features, and HMD now takes the crown for the worst software policy out of all well-known Android makers. But if you want to spend very little on a mobile phone, the Vibe will do.

Vibe Check

To me, the most important feature of a cheap smartphone is performance. If it's too slow and frustrating to use, then it doesn't matter how cheap it is. Good news then—the HMD Vibe is a fairly smooth-performing smartphone considering its $150 price. My initial impression was not great, as the phone was ridiculously slow as I was setting it up and installing all my apps, but once that was sorted, it's been fairly smooth sailing.

It's powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 680 chipset with 6 GB of RAM. I'm not saying this is a speedy device—there's even a small delay when you swipe up on an app to go to the home screen. Apps don't launch at lightning speed. But I've been using the Vibe for more than a week (on 4G LTE no less) and it's been better than tolerable. I've played games like Pako Forever and Alto's Odyssey with no problems, and my benchmark scores place it on par with the similarly priced Moto G Play 2024.

However, remember to turn on the Adaptive refresh rate in the phone's display settings menu. This bumps the refresh rate from 60 Hz to 90 Hz. Things were a bit choppy without it, but after I turned it on, there was a noticeable improvement in smoothness. Speaking of the display, this is a 6.56-inch LCD screen that's decently sharp but doesn't get too bright. On sunny days out, I had a hard time seeing content on the screen while out and about.

This phone looks pretty bland. It's just a black rectangle, with a bit of a graphite-esque design on the black rear. You do get a headphone jack and a microSD card slot to expand the included 128 GB of storage, but this phone does not have a fingerprint sensor. That's a convenience available on its peer, the Moto G Play 2024, and it lets you access secure apps quickly without having to log in all the time. HMD offers a basic face unlock, but it won't work with apps, and it doesn't work in the dark (or when you wear sunglasses).

It also does not have a near-field communication (NFC) sensor, so you cannot make contactless payments via Google Wallet. This is typically found on $200 phones but not often on $150 models. It's also only IP52 water resistant, so it'll be OK in the rain but can't be submerged.

As for the battery life, HMD claims two days of battery life, but I never got anything close. The 4,000-mAh cell can firmly give you a full day on a single charge, but less if you plan to use the phone for GPS navigating and music streaming. I averaged a little more than four hours of screen-on time. It's fine, but I'm baffled by HMD's claim. Bizarrely, its “test” to get that number was “active usage of a device for five hours per day with a new battery.”

Bad Vibes

I'll be honest, I'm pretty disappointed in what HMD has turned out to be. There was a chance to bring back the Nokia name (again) and that has just been relegated to feature phones. But at least with HMD's new direction, there's potential to drive some innovation and make budget phones that stand out and are feature-rich. The Vibe is … none of that.

The software is pretty simple—it's running stock Android 14. However, HMD says it will provide zero Android upgrades to this device. What you get is what you will have, forever. As for security updates, you'll get two years. Even Motorola offers three years of security updates (though I should note the Moto G Play runs Android 13 and will get one OS update to Android 14). HMD could've broken the mold and at least offered one update to the upcoming Android 15 OS version, but nope. Oh, there was also a lot of preinstalled bloatware; thankfully, it was all removable.

Annoyingly, I did run into a few bugs while using the Vibe. I could not get the voice to type on the default keyboard to work in any app. I'd press the voice type button and it'd tell me to speak, but nothing would register. Also, the flashlight toggle in the quick settings menu does not always work on the first or second try. It sometimes took me three taps for it to actually turn on. Finally, while I mostly had no problem using Google Maps to navigate while driving, there was one instance when the app got stuck and switched to a weird aspect ratio. I had to force close it and restart the app for it to go back to normal. Weird!

Worst of all are the cameras. There's a 5-MP selfie camera and a 13-MP main rear camera, and the results are almost unusable. I snapped a picture of my dog that looks so bad he's actually unrecognizable. Comparing selfie shots with the Moto G Play, my skin tone has a twinge of green in the Vibe's image. And all the nighttime shots I took were super grainy. The Moto G Play decidedly took better photos.

That leaves you with a phone that performs decently for the $150 price. I'd still steer you to the Moto G Play 2024, which gets an extra year of security updates, has more usable cameras, and has a fingerprint sensor. Plus, it doesn't have any of those weird bugs I encountered. The vibes are not good for HMD's Vibe. Here's hoping its upcoming phones make a bigger splash.