While Honor grabbed MWC 2026 headlines with a phone camera on a robot gimbal that spins and tracks your face like a mechanical puppy, Ulefone quietly arrived in Barcelona with a more practical, if less theatrical, idea: a rugged smartphone packing an actioncam module you can physically pop off and wear on your helmet or shirt, or mount to your bike handlebars.
The handset has been named the RugOne Xsnap 7 Pro, and launched under a new sub-brand of Ulefone dubbed RugOne. It centers on what the company calls the Xsnap modular ecosystem, built around a thumb-sized action camera that snaps magnetically into the phone's rear chassis. When detached, the unit becomes an "independent recording module" designed to "go exactly where the action is." This system is built around a magnetic backplane integrated into the rear of the phone.
The "mothership" handset serves as a remote viewscreen via wireless data transfer, as well as footage processing and storage hub, and somewhere to juice up the actioncam's battery when docked – in a similar way to the camping light and smartwatch modules found in Oukitel's WP300 model. Leeching charging power this way might be a worry for regular handsets, but rugged phone's usually come with monster batteries – in this case it's a whopping 9,000 mAh, not the biggest we've seen but still quite beefy.
Ulefone/RugOne hasn't yet revealed how long the battery in the actioncam module itself will last between top-ups, but it likely won't be long. For example, the Insta360 Go 3S, a benchmark in compact wearable cameras, delivers roughly 30 minutes of continuous recording. Also around the back is a 50-MP main camera for regular snapper duties and a dedicated 64-MP night-vision setup to reveal hidden after-dark secrets.
A future Xsnap ecosystem may include several modules beyond the action camera: a thermal imaging unit for industrial inspections and search-and-rescue, a night-vision enhancer with specialized sensors, and swappable optics including wide-angle and macro lenses might be next.
Or maybe not. The modular smartphone graveyard is well populated. Google buried Project Ara in 2016 before it reached consumers. Motorola launched the Moto Z lineup with swappable Moto Mods accessories and quietly retired the ecosystem years later without winning mainstream adoption. The problem was never the concept, it was the execution: expensive add-ons, thin ecosystems, and users who couldn't find a compelling reason to carry extras around.
However, such things could just work in the already experimental realm of the rugged smartphone, which tends to find a niche audience such as professionals looking to replace dedicated gear with a pocket-sized modular system that does it all. And RugOne isn't alone in this new modular rugged phone renaissance. TECNO debuted its own magnetic modular interconnect at MWC 2026, featuring pogo-pin connectors and wireless compatibility via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi under a near-identical philosophy. If multiple brands in this space converge and agree on a shared module standard, the landscape could look markedly different from the Ara era.
As for the Xsnap 7 Pro, we'll have to wait for the official launch to find out full specs. We do know that it will feature a MediaTek Dimensity 8400 5G chip supported by 12 GB of RAM (plus 12 GB of virtual memory) and 512 GB of storage. It will sport a 6.67-inch AMOLED display at 1.5K resolution and 120 Hz, with a 32-MP selfiecam holepunched up top. It also runs Android 16.
The prototype on display in Barcelona recently was marked as an 'Engineering Sample' so those given specs are subject to change ahead of release. On that, the sub-brand has announced neither a price nor a release date.
Source: RugOne
