In summary:
- Tech Advisor reports that Tecno unveiled a sleek modular smartphone concept featuring a 4.9mm aluminum body with magnetic attachments for various accessories.
- The Chinese manufacturer’s design uses wireless connectivity including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and mmWave to connect ten modular components like power banks, cameras, and gamepads.
- This concept appears more elegant than previous failed attempts like Google’s Project Ara, potentially offering a compelling solution for customizable smartphones.
The whole modular phone concept has been resurrected in unusually stylish fashion by a Chinese manufacturer.
You might not have heard of Tecno before, but while it doesn’t really have a presence in the West, the Chinese manufacturer has been turning out smartphones (mostly in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) for some years now.
The reason we’re highlighting this somewhat niche smartphone supplier is that it just revealed one of its most eye-catching phone concepts we’ve seen in quite some time.
Ahead of a full showcase at MWC 2026 next week, Tecno has released some snippets of information on a new prototype modular smartphone system.
Tecno
This so-called Tecno Modular Phone, powered by Modular Magnetic Interconnection Technology, permits “the seamless attachment and removal of slim, high-performance modules tailored to individual needs”.
We’ve seen modular smartphone concepts before in Google’s sadly cancelled Project Ara, and even in final devices such as the LG G5. The CMF Phone 1 and the Fairphone (Gen 6) have limited modular aspects to them, too.
But none of these concepts and products are as sleek as Tecno’s. The closest is Xiaomi’s Modular Optical System, one of the many interesting concept devices we saw at MWC 2025.
How does Techo’s differ?
It all starts with a clean and slender, 4.9mm aluminium body (in two one of visual languages: sleek and geeky), onto which you can snap a range of similarly-slim components using a combination of magnets and pogo pins.
There are ten magnetic accessories to choose from, including an extended power bank (just 4.5mm thick), various camera configurations (including an extended single lens), and even a physical gamepad. Each snaps onto one of eight modular zones dotted around the phone.
Tecno
Communication between these components is similarly flexible, switching between the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and millimeter-wave (mmWave) standards depending on the bandwidth and latency considerations.
If you’ve ever wondered what the point was of having a super-slim phone like the iPhone Air or the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, Tecno might have just supplied a compelling answer.
This is all very much at the concept stage right now, but it’s one that we like the look of. We’ll be looking out for it in Barcelona next week, that’s for sure.
Author: Jon Mundy, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Jon is a freelance journalist who got his start covering mobile games at the dawn of the App Store. He has since covered everything from smart home tech and laptops to food and culture, but always seems to return to his fascination with smartphones.