The HMD Fusion X1 brings sanity back to your teen’s smartphone habits

At MWC 2025, HMD has introduced the HMD Fusion X1 in collaboration with Xplora. It’s a modest smartphone if you’re only looking at specifications, but the secret sauce here is the Xplora subscription service that gives parents the tools to ease their children into the world of internet. Parents can restrict what their kids can do but gradually remove restrictions as their children get older, making it better than parental controls that only do blanket restrictions that can feel like a floodgate.

Android already offers parental controls, but they can feel underwhelming in terms of what you can control on your child’s device. The HMD Fusion X1 features customizable apps and internet access, allowing parents to limit social media, browsing, and screen time. It also includes continuous location tracking at 20-second intervals with safe zones and history, emergency SOS calling, low battery alerts, and remote device access for parents.

There’s also a School Mode that ensures distractions are minimized during school hours by locking specific apps and features when needed. You can even set it so your child cannot use their phone while walking. There is also an allowlist of contacts that your child can call but also whose calls they can receive.

All of these settings can be managed through the Xplora app on the parent’s device, as the app that your child sees on the HMD Fusion X1 will be pretty barebones.

HMD says the parent’s device can be either Android or iOS, and I like that you, as a parent, can still enjoy your favorite device and ecosystem without compromising your children’s safety on the internet. Note that the Xplora subscription starts at €4.99 per month, so you will need that in addition to your HMD smartphone purchase, as the company has not shared any details about bundling the Xplora service along with the X1.

For its specifications, the HMD Fusion X1 has a 108MP primary camera, a 5,000mAh battery, an IP54 splash resistance rating, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. HMD has also equipped the phone with “outfits” that can turn it into a device for specific use cases.

The press release doesn’t mention more details, but through my brief hands-on time with the phone, I’ve found out that it comes with the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, a 50MP front camera, and Android 14 out of the box.

This is what the HMD Fusion X1 is at this stage, which is rather interesting by itself. However, through the company’s Better Phone Project, launched in 2024, HMD promises to integrate real-time protection against harmful content with SafeToNet. The tech is said to provide on-device AI-powered protection to automatically detect and block harmful content before it reaches the user without relying on external apps that can be bypassed. We hope to learn more about this when the feature begins rolling out.

What do you think about the HMD Fusion X1 with the Xplora parental control suite of features? Let us know in the comments below!