HMD Global, the company making phones with Nokia, recently had to apologize online for exaggerating slim bezels on its latest HMD Pulse smartphone.
The issue came to light when a Twitter (now known as X) user posted a side-by-side comparison of the HMD Pulse in person and online pictures. The hands-on photo clearly showed how the HMD Pulse has much bigger bezels in person compared to marketing photos online.
The X user called out HMD for “deceiving its potential customers.”
HMD and Nokia’s CMO Lars Silberbauer attempted to defend the matter by claiming that digital photos on a website are different from an image taken from “some kind of camera on a phone in poor lighting”, even though the bottom bezel is very clearly shown to be bigger in the hands-on photo, which doesn’t exactly have poor lighting.
However, Silberbauer later admitted that it was a mistake “with this specific asset in the final render.” He said that he had checked in with his team and there was indeed a discrepancy.
From the looks of it, it seems to be an honest mistake from HMD rather than a deliberate attempt to make its phones look better than they are. This is because the Twitter user who originally pointed out the mismatched bezel sizes also shows that the HMD Pulse Pro, a better variant of the same phone, had accurate bezels on the website.
