It’s taken me a while to get around to writing up this review. HMD was kind enough to provide me a review unit of the HMD Skyline towards the end of last year.
This year I did something different and took a mental health break from writing reviews over the holiday season. As much as I love what I do here at DRN, the breakneck pace of technology makes it hard to step away. Hence my conscious decision to recharge my batteries.
It dovetails neatly into one of the core features of the HMD Skyline which I will dive into later.
First Impressions
This flagship device from HMD come in the Neon Pink colourway which just happens to be my princess’ favourite colour. Well one of a few.
I thought I was in trouble from the moment I unboxed my review unit with the colour. Interestingly enough though, my 6 year old is rather opinionated. Rather than it immediately grabbing her attention, she called out that the colourway more purple than pink. The second observation is that the phone is blocky.
To be fair the HMD Skyline is a slab phone that is quite rectangular. Towards the corners the phone tapers a bit to create the impression of a curved corner.
It took a few days but the Skyline grew on the little princess for a few reasons, including the part where it is substantially faster than the other device that we corral her apps on.
Looking around the phone, it sports the standard volume rocker and a power button on the right side of the phone. The power button also doubles as a fingerprint reader which is my personal preference compared to back mounted or under-screen types.
On the left side is a single button that can be customised to launch your favourite app or trigger a shortcut. By default it triggers the torch.
Self-Repairability
Very high on the list of features of the Skyline is that it is user repairable. We are starting to see the positive flow on effect of the right-to-repair laws in Europe and some US states. HMD has partnered up with iFixit to offer parts, tools and replacement guides. Looking through the guides, everything is set out and seems easy to follow with the right tools. I have repaired my own phone before and this look quite a bit easier when it’s designed to be from the ground up.
The OEM guides cover replacing the:
- Back Cover
- Battery
- Charging Board
- Screen
Additionally on the iFixit page they also offer replacement parts (and guides) for the loudspeaker and SIM card tray.
The other notable point is that parts for this phone is available for seven years which is pretty dang good!
I am sure I do not need to preach to the converted. Devices in my household gets passed down to the kids to get a bit more life out of them. It would be so much easier to be able to just swap the battery for example to give it a new lease of life.
Or in the case of the screen, rather than upwards of around $300 a pop for someone to replace it, it is much cheaper and simpler when the phone is designed for self-repairability.
The trade off for this convenience is the water and dust resistance. With an IP54 raining, a bit of dust, splash and rain won’t hurt it, but it is definitely not one for submersion.
In Use
I took the Skyline with me on a family holiday back in January. It was a good opportunity to play with it away from the environment I am usually in.
One thing I really like about the HMD Skyline is that out of the box, the theme matches the colourway out of the box. It comes with a matching wallpaper and it is just really nice synergy.
The screen is a 6.55 inch pOLED with a 144 Hz screen refresh rate. The caveat here is that by default the refresh rate is set to adaptive and is limited to 120 frames per second in this setting. If you want to take it all the way to 144 Hz, you will need to manually set that in the settings. Bearing in mind that there will be a trade off with the battery life.
The screen itself is rather nice to work with. Overall I found that it is a smooth experience, the colour rendering is good with support for HDR10 and the display is sharp.
The peak brightness is limited to 1000 nits which is perfectly fine for indoor use. On the beach on a sunny day though, I struggled to see the screen when I took the photos. There was a lot of squinting and quite a bit of guesswork as to what I was framing in the viewfinder.
Digital Detox
Whilst I took some time off to recharge my own batteries through necessity and self discipline, one of the top billing features on the HMD Skyline is the Digital Detox mode.
If you are feeling you are spending too much time on social media, or gaming, or the next addicting app, then this tool is HMD’s answer to help you corral those distractions on your phone and bring you back to the present.
What is it you ask? The Digital Detox mode baked into the HMD Skyline allows you to mute apps and contacts for a period of time, or indefinitely.
The control in this app is granular. You can pick and choose which apps and contacts are allowed during detox. All the ones that don’t make the cut do not disappear though, their icons are greyed out and you just can’t launch them.
Limiting screen time is always a battle particularly during school holidays. Parents know all too well the challenge to keep the little ones entertained, engaged, whilst juggling every other thing. It is all too easy to just let it slip and let the screen babysit the kids.
This is where the Digital Detox tool can help. There are two modes that it can run it: Soft Lock and Hard Lock.
The Soft Lock is just that, your chosen apps and contacts are muted for the period of time you nominate. You have the option to override soft lock via the widget or from the drop down menu.
For those who need a little more tough love to enforce discipline, this is where the Hard Lock mode comes in. The Detox blocks are locked on until either the timer is finished or until the phone is restarted, whichever comes first. So yes you can override it, but only if you reboot the phone.
HMD offers a minimum of 12 hours as a preset for the hardcore lock mode, but you can custom set it to as little as one hour. The maximum you can set is two days.
Being the daughter of a tech reviewer means the princess gets to see a lot of tech, and also pick up on things very quickly. The reality is neither the Soft Lock or the Hard Lock are effective on it’s own without good parenting practices or self discipline. What it offers is a firebreak to disrupt the flow so that you can utilise other tools to disengage from the screen, and that is a good thing.
It also offers to change the wallpaper to give a visual reminder that your Skyline is in Digital Detox mode.
Camera
On paper the Skyline comes with some pretty hefty specs on the camera.
The main camera is a 108MP beast with electrical (EIS) and optical (OIS) image stabilisation. The module also include a 13MP ultra-wide and a 50MP telephoto lens with 4x hybrid zoom. The selfie camera is a 50MP in a punch hole configuration that can track your eyes for focus. It can also cycle from 0.5x to 4x zoom for the perfect selfie framing.
All the cameras used pixel-binning – which is a way to well, jack up the MP number without totally compromising low light performance. You can override this and opt for full-resolution captures via the settings.
Despite the numbers, the camera performance on the Skyline is on par with other mid-range phones. Where the light is favourable and adequate, the results are quite acceptable. Colour reproduction is not quite faithful to life but it is not too harsh off the pace. However beyond that your mileage will vary.
Low light performance is about as expected. Both the focus and shutter are slower which makes taking photos a little more challenging if your subject is likely to move. I tried taking photos of Mochi and it took more than a few goes to get the results here. Colour reproduction here is also a bit more off the pace and the image suffers from graininess. Again this is not unusual in the mid-range space.
Battery Life and Charging
The Skyline is packed with a 4600 mAh battery which is within a stone’s throw of competitors. The benchmark these days is at 5000 mAh so on paper HMD is not excelling here.
Without formally measuring it, screen on time was clocked just over five hours. However with Digital Detox regime in place it was easily lasting the day without dramas. And with the return to school (thankfully), I am down to charging the Skyline once every few days.
Speaking of charging, it take about 70 minutes to charge up fully from empty.
The Skyline can support up to 33W fast charging over Power Delivery 3.0 which is not top of the range, but then again the phone is not aimed to compete with flagship devices. HMD includes a cable in the box but no bundled charger.
What it does come with though, is Qi2 wireless charging at 15W. As a bonus it also offers reverse wireless charging at 5W.
Other Features
As has been the case with HMD, the Android experience is pretty close to stock. There are some apps preloaded on the device when it comes out of the box but nothing that can’t be uninstalled.
The significant change is the Digital Detox mode which I have covered off earlier.
You can expand the storage on the Skyline via the microSD slot at the bottom of the phone. Rather than a long SIM and microSD slot, HMD has cleverly made one side of the tray for SIM and the other for microSD.
Gripes
Keeping in mind that the Skyline is a mid-range phone, there is little to complain about. I do want to point out that HMD is offering only two major OS updates for hardware that they will have parts to support for seven years.
The phone launched with Android 14 in 2024 and at time of writing Android 15 has been made available to it. That means the next major update will take it to Android 16 and that will be the end of the line.
Other Thoughts
I want to talk out loud on the Digital Detox mode. I think it’s a great feature to have and that is available out of the box. Is it perfect? Hardly. But readers of the site knows my view on using tools and legislation to take over parenting decisions.
One feature I would love to see implemented would be rather than a scheduled based detox mode as is in the current form, I would love to be able to say, between the hours 10am and 5pm you can have a set amount of screen time. You can use it all in one block, or you can use it cumulatively over that period until you run out.
Conclusions
I am quite torn on this. I love the Digital Detox mode. The option for self-repair is also very attractive for those who look to recycle devices in the family, or teenagers with butter fingers with a penchant of breaking their screens. The decision to put a six year gap between hardware and software support I think is absolute madness.
The HMD Skyline has the great build quality of the old Nokia devices and as a package it is definitely a step in a good direction.
Do I think the HMD Skyline is the best mid-range phone on the market? I think it’s the wrong question to ask when there are always compromises that has to be made, the best would be a handset where the compromises aren’t features that affects your usage. At the full price of RRP A$899 it is in tough competition against other units such as the Google Pixel 8a. At time of publishing there are some deals on Amazon that takes at least one colourway down to around $615 which does makes it very attractive for a device that can last for a few years, particularly if there is a transition from late primary school to early high school years.
DRN would like to thank HMD for providing the review unit and for their patience.
The mobile phone charms are all hand made by my partner Anii, give her a follow on TikTok @Unhyndered and sing out if you see something you like! Little miss princess has the best accessorised phone in town.
