Need just a phone with none of the frills of a smartphone on a low budget? The HMD 110 is what you need.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| It’s astonishingly affordable | Calling the camera “bad” is perhaps understating matters |
| Good battery life | Battery life is good because it really doesn’t do much |
| Nice assistive features | Feels cheap in the hand (because it is cheap) |
Score: 4/5
In this review
HMD 110 4G Specifications
HMD 110 4G Design
HMD 110 4G Camera
HMD 4G 110 Performance
HMD 110 4G Battery
HMD 110 4G Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The HMD 110 4G used in this review was loaned to me by HMD Australia, and I believe they’re going to ask for it back – which is 100% fine, and has no impact on my review in any way whatsoever. Equally, HMD has had no input or early access to this review – they can read it at the same time you can. And finally, as always, I strongly believe that upfront ethical disclosure is a very good idea indeed.
For more on ART’s Ethics policy, see here.
Design
HMD has been making feature phones – those classic “candybar” and “flip” style phones that were all the rage in the late 1990s and early 2000s – for quite some time now. You might not have been aware of that, but if you’ve glanced at a “Nokia” branded phone released over the last eight years or so, including Nokia feature phones, it was actually produced by HMD under licence.
In recent times, HMD’s been branching out more selling phones under its own branding, such as the HMD Pulse Pro and HMD Skyline.
Those are full Android phones, however, but it’s not just in the smartphone space that HMD is pushing its own branding.
The HMD 110 4G isn’t HMD’s first own-branded feature phone, but it’s the first one to pass over my reviews desk since it started moving away from Nokia branding for such matters.
Indeed, HMD has already been down this suffix path before with a Nokia 110 phone released back in 2023, and in some ways this is just an update of that idea with the Nokia branding subtly removed. That’s worth noting if only because if you’re chasing one down to buy online, you’ll probably find (as I did) a lot of mentions of the 2023 Nokia 110 — and they’re not quite the same phone.
The HMD 110 4G is a candy bar form factor feature phone with a simple 2.4 inch 320×240 pixel colour display sitting on top of a five way direction pad and relatively flat number buttons. It’s a clean and simple enough to understand design, though for some users who favour this kind of phone I could see the flatter buttons being something of an issue if you have manual dexterity problems.
At 89g, it is very light in the hand, and while that makes it easy to lift and really no issue at all for holding up for longer phone conversations, it’s also because the HMD 110 4G is a very inexpensive phone that’s been built as cheaply as possible to meet its $79 AUD asking price.
I haven’t put the HMD 110 4G through a punishing series of endurance tests – mostly because a lot of those tests you see online are pure garbage – but it doesn’t take too much use to realise that this isn’t a heavy duty unit. It is rated IP54 for the model sold in the Australian market — and oddly only IP52 for international models — but I wouldn’t suggest you take the HMD 110 4G into the bath with you any time soon.
If anyone at HMD is listening, I’d be all up for a rebadged, slightly updated Nokia 800 Tough under the HMD banner. Some food for thought, but in the meantime, if you do buy an HMD 110 4G, go easy on it.
Surprisingly for such an inexpensive phone, you do actually get some colour choices, with the HMD 110 4G selling in Australia in either a Titanium or Blue finish. I like the look of the blue phone, though it’s the Titanium variant I’ve been testing out for this review.
Camera
The HMD 110 4G has a camera… just.
It’s 2025, and calling a QVGA lens – that’s just 320×240 pixels – a “camera” is perhaps overselling it a touch.
It’s not good.
This is the way of such feature phones, and it’s not entirely just a throwback to the camera optics that classic feature phones had, because the underlying processors found in such phones genuinely can’t address higher specification camera sensors at all.
That’s the technical reason behind it, but what it leaves you and I with is a camera that delivers pictures that can only be called “woeful” at best.
Nyssa is not impressed with the camera quality of the HMD 110 4G
These are, by the way, the BEST shots I got from the HMD 110 4G. And they’re full size.
Wombles would come to the conclusion that the HMD 110’s camera has already been recycled.
Selfies are technically feasible, but you have to flip the camera around to take them
(and hope for the best)
If you’re looking for the weakest part of the HMD 110 4G’s offerings, the camera is it. While this is a stupendously inexpensive phone, for not much more than this you can score a cheap Android phone that will run rings around it in camera terms.
Performance
The whole point of the HMD 110 4G is that it’s a simple feature phone. These types of phones typically appeal to one of two particular interest groups. There’s the belief that they’re beloved of older phone users because they’re simpler and more familiar, and while I think it’s a mistake to bundle any group in wholesale for that kind of generalisation, it’s equally also true that there are a number of older phone users who prefer this style.
More recently there’s been something of a marketing push towards this kind of feature phone being useful for “digital detox”, built around the idea that a phone like this with very limited capabilities is a much less distracting device.
Honestly, either approach is fine, but you do have to realise what the HMD 110 4G can and can’t do with its very limited feature set. It’s running on a Unisoc T127 processor, though “running” here implies some level of speed, and that’s not really what this phone does.
What you’re looking at here is a very limited feature set that primarily focuses around calling and texting functions. Because of its prior Nokia branded tie-up, you do get Snake on board, though it’s HMD’s slightly odd colourised version if you have a hankering for the monochrome classic. You also get a selection of six other inbuilt games – Arrow Master, Racing Attack, Ninja Up, Doodle Jump, Air Strike and Football Cup – but these are purely demo versions of these games with a limited number of plays before you’d have to pay for the full apps if they interested you.
There’s no onboard app store, though it does feature an onboard web browser and Facebook client app. Using either in any kind of serious way is an absolute chore, partly because the HMD 110 4G lacks any inbuilt Wi-Fi, so it’s going to use pricey mobile data only, but mostly because you’re stuck entering any text via the classic T9 text layout method.
Way back in the day – and I’m old enough to have been there – T9 was just about acceptable because it’s literally all we had. An awful lot of early online abbreviations owe their existence to the general awfulness of T9 style inputs, because it was a lot easier to put “LOL” or similar shorter lines in than try to type out full words. OK, that was also because SMS messages had text lengths and we got charged real money for each one, or for going over… but I digress.
The real reason you’d want the HMD 110 4G is for its more basic calling and texting functions, and these work well enough for what they are. As its suffix suggests, the HDM 110 4G is a 4G-only phone, not that you’ll be straining its data capabilities with just texts and calling.
One nice feature that the HMD 110 4G had enabled on my review unit was the Phone Talker functionality, which very much does what you might think it does. Enable it, and the HMD 110 4G will quite loudly speak out everything you’ve highlighted, whether it’s an app, a phone number or a message.
All too often assistive technologies like this are only found in more expensive devices, so it’s great to see something that can assist those with limited or no vision to use technology in such a low cost device.
Battery
The HMD 110 4G uses a removable 1,450mAh battery pack, and every time I do one of these reviews, I inevitably end up with questions as to how to remove batteries or add SIM cards.
The HMD 110 4G is actually one of the easier phones to swap batteries, SIM cards and microSD cards out that I’ve tested with, but to help out I shot this quick video to give viewers a guideline not just for it, but also other removable battery feature phones:
Battery testing feature phones is, honestly, a bit of a pain, because it’s not like I can run my standard smartphone YouTube battery test over them.
1,450mAh is astonishingly small by smartphone standards, but the point here is that the HMD 110 4G really doesn’t try to do all that much that needs a huge battery pack to keep running. HMD’s own claims around it relate to it having 10 hours of talk time, because in this case that really is a relevant metric for battery usage.
While I’ve tested out the HMD 110 4G for the purposes of this review, its limited feature set meant that it couldn’t be my daily driver, so I can’t honestly say that I’ve tested it to the point of battery exhaustion with a 10-hour call or anything like that. It’s certainly very easily capable of daily usage and into multiple days if you’re not making a lot of calls on it.
One of the ways that HMD does sell the HMD 110 4G for such a low price is by not including a charger in the box, something you might have expected from a classic feature phone. Instead, you just get a standard USB-A to USB-C charging cable, so if you don’t already have a charger ready, you’d need to budget for one.
HMD 110 4G: Alex’s Verdict
Is the HMD 110 4G the one great feature phone that will revitalise the category and have the iPhone and Galaxy phone crowds defecting in droves to a simpler phone life?
Nope.
That’s really not what it’s for, however. As a basic and highly affordable phone that is just a phone, it gets the job done. Sometimes, and for some people, that’s all you need.
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HMD 110 4G: Pricing and availability
The HMD 110 4G retails in Australia for $79 outright.
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