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Tom’s Guide

Technology

Richard Priday

This modular phone concept lets you connect anything from an external microphone to a whole camera lens via magnets

Tom Guide Tecno LG Motorola

Tecno modular phone camera add-on with lens removed and additional sensor exposed.

MWC this year might stand for Modular World Congress. We've already seen Lenovo's modular ThinkBook laptop, and now we have Tecno — a phone maker that's never shy about making wild concept devices — with its own modular smartphone system to show off. While it's only a concept, I got to see it in action on the show floor, and I liked it more than I thought I would.

Modular phones have been tried before, with products like Motorola's Moto Mods or the LG G series phones, culminating in the G8X ThinQ Dual Screen. But with both of those now defunct, it's been some time since we saw someone try their own spin on the formula. Officially titled "Modular Magnetic Interconnection Technology," Tecno's concept claims to be a possible solution to the issue of making phones more capable without making them overly bulky. And it does that by letting users mix and match parts as they see fit.

It all starts with the basic phone. It's a little like an iPhone Air in terms of its slim profile (except even slimmer at 4.9mm /0.19 inches thick) and the big camera bar at the top of the back panel. But see those bronze-colored pads? Those are the magnetic points to which you attach the modular elements. And Tecno sure had a lot of them to show off.

We can start off with the more pedestrian mods, like the external microphone or the speaker (shown above), both of which are common types of peripherals that just happen to be magnetically attachable to the back of the phone.

There's also the option to add an antenna that lets you make local calls, walkie-talkie style - something a few phones like Oppo's Find X9 offer, but still something we already know is practical. But these mods are only the tip of the iceberg.

You can attach a telephoto converter to the camera block to give the single lens optical zoom at your leisure.

Alternatively, you can augment the phone with an action cam with Wi-Fi connectivity, so you can use it separately or attached, including to the display side of the phone for your extreme selfie needs. This mod in particular looks like a natural fit for the lanyard or clip attachments that are also part of the modular suite.

But if that's all inadequate, you can add on a full camera body, with a separate sensor and lens that offers up to 20x optical zoom. The lens comes with a manual focus ring too, although from the way the Tecno stand staffer instructed me to hold it, this one feels like it's a little too much for the magnets to hold on by themselves.

There's no USB-C port, or port of any kind, on this concept - it's wireless charging or nothing. Fortunately, the charger still has the required modular connectors on its top side, so it can join in the stacking fun too.

But maybe you won't need that charger much, since one of the largest add-ons is a battery pack, adding an extra 3,000 mAh of capacity (over half the capacity of a regular large smartphone) in a surprisingly slim body. But if you need to be really, really certain you're not going to run out of battery, you can stack multiple battery packs on top of one another to keep adding more and more capacity.

If you can't decide which to use, you can simply stack all the mods on top of one another to make an extremely capable but monstrous-looking phone. It's kind of heavy, and dropping it would have meant a firework display of plastic, glass and silicon, but wow, you sure feel powerful holding it.

We're used to phones that try to do everything, but in doing so, phones have continued to get larger and heavier. Allowing users to switch in and out to the exact features they need means a more portable default phone experience, plus hopefully better hardware.

But I'm still not confident that this would work in practice - I imagine some of the larger modular attachments would be quite expensive, then there's the question of how you store or transport them all safely. These are all problems that Motorola, LG and the others had to deal with, and that ultimately spelled the end of their modular dreams.

Still, Tecno's system is well thought out in spite of the usual issues with modular tech. And there has been plenty more to see at MWC 2026, including a selection of products we liked so much, we rated them our MWC 2026 Best in Show.