🧲 Chinese brand Tecno has shown off a clever modular, magnetic smartphone at MWC 2026
📱 The idea involves a thin base phone and magnetic attachments including a 3000mAh battery pack, a microphone, and even a huge telephoto zoom lens
👀 The accessories work with the phone over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mmWave and attach via pogo pins on the device’s rear
👏 It’s all very clever, although Tecno says it’s just a concept device at the moment, with no plans for a wider release
You’ve probably gathered that it’s MWC this week in Barcelona, and before I exit the show for another year, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite products from the vast exhibition space. Surprisingly, it isn’t the Honor Robot Phone, but a clever modular phone from fellow Chinese firm Tecno.
We’ve seen modular phones before, including Google’s ill-fated Project Ara from 2013 and the LG G5, which did make it to market, although perhaps marked the beginning of the end for LG’s smartphone division. The fact is that it’s an idea people have pursued, but it’s never been quite right.
It seems as if Tecno is looking at this concept with a fresh enthusiasm, promising this concept as the “exploration of the next-gen form of smartphones”. The idea is that you have a base phone that’s just under 5mm thin, from which you can add as many extras as you want to build the phone you desire.
The extras can range from an additional 3000mAh battery pack (and you can add multiple on top of one another) to a USB-C port with a fixed cable (the phone is too thin to have one on its own), right the way up to a huge telephoto lens attachment as part of a camera grip.
The phone’s accessories attach via pogo pins and magnets, and connect to the device via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mmWave for a seamless, plug-and-play style of use. Admittedly, it was quite strange attaching the teleconverter or telephoto camera lens and needing to connect to Wi-Fi for it to work properly. But work it did.
The telephoto lens attachment is removable, and theoretically, there’d be room for Tecno to offer its own array of lenses, or have third-party adapters to make existing camera glass work. That’s assuming this would be popular enough in the first place to make accessories available, but it’s nice to speculate.
Moreover, there were also more functional accessories, including a wireless microphone you attach to your clothes, as well as a wallet and a magnetic kickstand. You could end up with a very thick sandwich of components affixed to a hyper-thin phone if you so choose.
The problem I’d foresee is how you’d carry this array of accessories around with you. It’s fantastic in principle, but it isn’t the easiest to conceptualize, such as if you wanted to carry the heavy telephoto lens and grip attachment around alongside a range of battery packs.
Tecno says this idea is purely a concept at the moment, meaning we’re not going to see it arrive any time soon. Nonetheless, I hope this isn’t one of those vaporware concept devices it’s easy to get giddy over before it disappears into the ether. With some refinement, this could well be a phone of the future.
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Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.