HMD Pulse Pro Review: Budget friendly with repairability in mind

75%

Budget friendly

• For their first handset, HMD have delivered a budget friendly, and great looking Device in the Pulse Pro. It's not the most powerful handset, with the RAM Boost a definite must to improve performance. The camera could be better, but it takes the shot and overall it's a decent offering at this price, though it's up against some stiff competition.

 

The name HMD has become synonymous with mobile phones thanks to eight years of producing great phones under the Nokia brand. The company struck out on their own, announcing HMD branded Pulse line back in May and I grabbed the HMD Pulse Pro for a review.

Priced at $299, the HMD Pulse Pro sets the tone for the entire HMD Pulse line. The design is mirrored down the line through their Pulse+ and Pulse handsets, with a clean look, an array of ‘calm’ tones to choose from and the promise of repairability with an accessible price.

The phone includes a large 6.56-inch HD+ resolution display with an octa-core Unisoc processor, 6GB RAM and 128GB of on-board storage. There’s a 5000 mAh battery with 20W fast charging support powering the phone, with a dual camera array including a 50MP sensor on the rear, and the same 50MP sensor on the front. 

Overall it’s a lot of hardware packed into a $299 phone, it comes with the Pro in the name, so is it a pro option for your money? I’ve spent three weeks with the HMD Pulse Pro and here’s how it went. 

Hardware 

Design

The whole phone design is geared around repairability, with the display, battery and charging port – the three most commonly replaced parts on a smartphone – all able to be easily replaced, with guides, and parts available through iFixit. Despite being easy to repair, you wouldn’t know it, it has a sleek design though the glossy rear panel is a fingerprint magnet and there’s no TPU case included – so you’ll be cleaning it regularly.

The HMD Pulse Pro looks similar to a lot of the smartphones you’ll see these days, though it offers a sleek, glossy rear which is a fingerprint magnet. There’s no TPU case included in the box, which has been a mainstay of budget phones for a while, so you’ll need to clean this one regularly. 

The dual rear camera array sits in the top left, including a 50MP main sensor and a 2MP depth sensor, with the HMD logo sitting in the centre. 

The phone setup is fairly typical with a volume rocker and fingerprint sensor enabled power button on the left. There’s a USB Type-C port on the base for charging and data transfer, with a downward firing speaker, and headphone jack positioned on either side. 

 

There’s a SIM tray on the left side, which offers dual-SIM, as well as housing the microSD card slot if you want to expand storage. 

Display and Audio

There’s a 6.56-inch HD+ (1612×720) resolution IPS LCD display in 20:9 aspect ratio in the Pulse Pro. The 20:9 aspect ratio makes for a tall phone, so you’ll need to stretch to use it one-handed – which even I found difficult and I have larger hands.

The display is still bright enough for daily use, even outdoors with the phone able to produce a peak brightness of 600nits, making it fairly easy to see in brighter daylight. 

It also supports a refresh rate of 90Hz, which makes for some smooth scrolling, which may impact your battery life – though the battery lasts sufficiently long with 90Hz selected that you shouldn’t find it impacts battery life too much.

The display is decent, though at 720p it is very low resolution when compared against the competition such as the Moto G84 and even Galaxy A15 which are the same price – yet include a 1080p display at 90Hz, and even step up to AMOLED/pOLED. 

On the audio side, the HMD Pulse Pro includes only the single downward firing speaker on the bottom of the phone – not even offering stereo sound using the earpiece. It’s a decent mono sound, though as you’d expect the bass isn’t very good. 

You do still have the option to plug in wired headphones through the audio jack, but there’s none included in the box, so you’ll have to track down your own pair.

Performance and Connectivity

The HMD Pulse Pro includes a Unisoc T606 processor, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage (which can be expanded with a microSD card).

The Unisoc processor and RAM combination is quite slow for a phone, often leaving you waiting for long periods of time as apps load, or even to perform functions. 

To make up for the shortfall in memory, HMD have built-in a virtual RAM boost which is able to give you a boost to either 4GB or 6GB of memory essentially using your storage for RAM. It sort of works, smoothing out a few bumps, however you do still find yourself waiting for apps to load. 

As usual, I ran the phone through the usual Geekbench and 3DMark benchmarks and here’s how they went.

The HMD Pulse Pro includes a number of connectivity options, though they’re based on older standards like Wifi 802.11 AC and Bluetooth 5.0. The Unisoc processor also doesn’t support a 5G modem, so you only get 4G on the go. 

The USB Type C port is present, though HMD has chosen to use a USB 2.0 port, so any physical transferring of data will be quite slow. 

Camera

The HMD Pulse Pro includes a “dual” camera setup on the rear conisting of a 50MP sensor and 2MP depth sensor, allowing the phone to produce portrait photos with a decent bokeh effect. There’s also a 50MP front-facing camera for selfies embedded into the display. 

The 50MP shots from the rear sensor are stacked, so you end up with a 12MP shot which combines four images into one. The HMD Pulse Pro camera isn’t the greatest, but it will capture a decent picture given enough time to frame and capture the shot. It’s not great at being whipped out and snapping a quick shot. The pictures often lack a little contrast, looking flat to me overall. 

Night shots are ok, but really lack any computational improvements from the processor to elevate the shots.

 

Charging and Battery

The HMD Pulse Pro includes a 5000 mAh battery and supports fast charging at 20W. The phone does NOT include a charger, instead you get a USB Type-C cable to charge it from any available brick, or USB port. 

If you do charge with a 20W charger, the ‘fast’ charging isn’t very impressive with the phone getting 14% charge in 15 minutes, but taking just over two hours and 20 minutes to get to full charge.

HMD Pulse Pro charging times:

• 5 Minutes: 2%
• 15 Minutes: 14%
• 30 Minutes: 35%
• 60 Minutes: 74%
• 90 Minutes: 93%
• 120 Minutes: 99%
• 135 Minutes: 99%
• 142 Minutes: 100%

 

In terms of battery life, the HMD Pulse Pro does shine, with the phone easily able to last a full day on a single charge, with plenty of leftover to spare if you need it – though you should be charging at night based on the slow charging speeds.

Software 

Through the Nokia range, HMD delivered an almost stock version of Android and they’re continuing that trend with their own phones, with a simple Android 14 build included. 

The phone runs the October 2023 security patch out of the box, with the phone receiving an update to June 2024 just prior to this review going out.

As far as updates go, HMD has advised the phone will receive two OS updates, as well as three years of quarterly security updates. It’s not comparable to the Samsung and Google commitment to 7 years of updates on even their ‘budget’ devices, but it’s better than similarly priced devices like the Moto G54 which only get one OS update. 

The HMD Android build is almost stock, though it’s been skinned with a black and white icon arrangement which replaces the stock icon with a custom one – that is, if there’s one available. 

While the idea is sound, the implementation comes undone the second a custom icon isn’t available, leaving you with mostly black and white icons, with a single colourful app icon sticking out like a sore thumb – this even extends to the apps they pre-install on the phone which is an odd choice.

Should you buy it?

The HMD Pulse Pro, like it’s stablemates the Plus and HMD Pulse, present a quandary. I like the HMD line with its clean design, and they present a relatively clean version of Android. The HMD line also comes with the option to repair key components on the phone – something I philosophically love.  

Where the HMD Pulse Pro falls down is the lower end processor and basic camera. The Design, repairability and everything else is just what I want from HMD in a phone. I just want a little more performance from my phone, without having to use the RAM boost.

Overall though, the HMD Pulse Pro is a good phone, though does suffer from performance issues. I want to see what else HMD can do on this new range of devices, but if you think the HMD Pulse Pro is for you, you can get your hands on one from JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, Officeworks and Big W.