The “designed for reparability” Nokia G22 is just a normal cheap phone

HMD and its licensed Nokia brand is taking a swing at a repairable smartphone with the Nokia G22. Like Google and Samsung, HMD has struck up a partnership with iFixit to offer official parts and repair guides online. Besides the partnership, HMD goes one step further and claims: “Starting with Nokia G22, we’ll be designing and building smartphones that are easier to repair.” It’s great to see a company tout attempts at a more repairable design, but there isn’t much in the G22 that makes it more repairable than a normal cheap phone.

The phone is a low-end $179 (179 euro) device with a 6.52-inch, 90 Hz, 1200×720 LCD. The SoC is a ‘Unisoc T606’—a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP1. It has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5050 mAh battery with 20 W charging. The phone has a side fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, MicroSD slot, and, if you get the “TA-1528” model, NFC. The phone comes with Android 12 and has two years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates, which are both pretty good for a cheap phone. It’ll be for sale on March 8 in the UK for 149.99 pounds ($179), with sales also happening in Europe and Australia eventually.

As for iFixit’s half of this partnership, there are four parts for sale in the parts store: A screen for $53, a battery for $26, a charge port for $20, and a new plastic back panel for $26. There are also the usual high-quality guides from iFixit that detail every screw and clip you’ll have to deal with to replace those parts, along with a recommended list of tools.