HMD Global is launching four Nokia-branded smartphones ahead of Mobile World Congress. As previously reported, the Nokia C02 is a cheap phone with a removable battery. And the new Nokia C22 and C32 smartphones are affordable phones with up to 3 days of battery life.

But the new Nokia G22 is probably the most interesting of the bunch, as it’s the first Nokia phone from HMD designed to be user repairable.

HMD has partnered with iFixit to offer replacement parts, repair guides, and tools that let you fix the most commonly broken parts of a phone including the battery, display, and charging port.

The company says it takes about five minutes to swap out a battery or about twenty minutes to replace a broken screen. While there are certainly phones where it’s even easier to perform these actions, HMD says it would have taken closer to an hour and a half to do a battery replacement on its older phones.

While it’s nice to see another company starting to treat repairability as a selling point for at least one of its new phones, HMD’s efforts look more lake baby steps than giant leaps into smartphone sustainability. If your Nokia G22 display breaks or your battery life gets too short for your liking, it’s nice to know that you’ll be able to replace those parts it without taking your phone to a shop. But HMD is only promising to offer two years of Android OS updates and three years of security updates for the Nokia G22.

That falls short of the promises we’ve seen from other phone makers including Samsung, OnePlus, and Fairphone in recent years. Still, it’d be surprising to see HMD offer much longer support than that for a phone that’s expected to sell for €179 (about $189).

The phone’s specs aren’t very exciting, but they don’t look bad for a phone in that price range. The Nokia G22 has a 6.52 inch, 720p display with a 90 Hz refresh rate and a notch for the front-facing camera. The phone has 4GB of RAM, 64GB or 128GB of storage, and a Unisoc T606 processor with dual-core Mali-G57 graphics and two Cortex-A75 CPU cores plus 6 Cortex-A55 cores, all topping out at 1.6 GHz.

HMD equips the phone with a 5,050 mAh battery that the company says should provide up to three days of battery life. It has a 50MP primary camera, a 2MP depth sensor and 2MP macro camera plus an 8MP front-facing camera.

HMD says iFixit will sell replacement charging ports for €20, replacement batteries for €25, and replacement screens for €45.

press release (1)(2)

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