Nokia’s whole smartphone lineup is moving forward to only one thing: reliability. HMD Global, the brand’s current creative partner, has drawn on a residual fondness for Nokia’s simple, straightforward feature phones. And the Nokia G20 is also on this thing.
To that purpose, the Nokia G20 is very well, long-lasting, environmentally responsible, and refreshingly devoid of unnecessary software frills. Meanwhile, at this price, two years of continuous software upgrades to the most recent Android OS delivers an extraordinary level of future-proofing.
It’s also quite reasonable, at £144.99/US$169.99, putting it in direct rivalry with the Moto G10. Is there, nevertheless, any space for a little fun among all this worthiness? Should Nokia’s smartphone efforts be a bit looser?
The Nokia G20 is now available for purchase in the United Kingdom, either directly from Nokia or through third-party stores including Amazon, Very, and Argos.
The only model available here is the £144.99/$169.99 variant, which is on the bottom end of the inexpensive phone range. It has company in the form of the Motorola Moto G10 as well as the Vivo Y20s, although both are superior to the Nokia G20.
Both of those competing phones provide higher performance and even longer battery life, not to mention the fact that they come with a charger. The UI of the Vivo Y20s is a lot more confusing, while the Moto G10‘s crisp Android experience is equally as nice as Nokia’s.
The Nokia G20 is a straightforward, practical device. It’s not very large, measuring 164.9 x 76 x 9.2mm, and it’s not particularly light, weighing 197g. In any case, it’s a little thinner and lighter than the Moto G10.
It’s also surprisingly enjoyable to use. That’s partly due to HMD’s choice of a matte texture for the plastic back cover, which is a refreshing difference from the usual clean, glossy, fake-glass rear panels available at this price point.
It not only looks good, but it also improves the phone’s grip and reduces the problem of greasy fingerprints. The Nokia G20 feels quite robust in the hand, as it has in the past. When you push the center of that rough back, there’s a little break and flex, but it doesn’t feel cheap.
The model which is likely to everyone is in the Night color, which has a deep midnight blue tone to it. The white Glacier variant, all the assumptions are that, isn’t nearly as subtle or elegant, but it’s an alternative if you like.
When you get your first message or open the phone for the first time. That exquisite hand feel is slightly destroyed. The haptics is large, hazy, and rattling. On the phone’s right side, the fingerprint sensor is disguised under a bigger power button. It’s a strategy that Sony and Samsung were using with some of their recent £1,000+ phones, and it performs just as well at this price point.
Aside from a volume rocker on the same right-hand edge that seems a tad too high, the Nokia G20 also has a separate Google Assistant key on the other side of the phone. It’s just as unnecessary here as it was on every other phone with a similar function.
The Nokia G20 has a 3.5mm headphone port on the top edge, which isn’t particularly uncommon at this price point but is nonetheless pleasant. If you only have £135 to spend on a smartphone, You’re unlikely to get enough money left over for a decent pair of wireless earbuds. Even incorporating wire isn’t always a good idea.
Even in 2021, you should have realistic hopes for a sub-£150 smartphone. The Nokia G20’s display, on the other hand, left anyone a bit unhappy. It isn’t the 6.52in screen size, which is plenty, nor the fact that it has an LCD display. For this money, it would be ridiculous to expect OLED.
It’s not even the reality that this display’s refresh rate is only 60Hz. True, there are lots of phones under £200 with 90Hz and sometimes even 120Hz screens, but it still means a 20 to 40% increase in price. With auto-brightness turning off, this screen doesn’t get very bright (about 400 nits), but it’s bright sufficient in all but the brightest outside circumstances.
Similarly, color fidelity is good for the money, with 83.9 percent sRGB gamut coverage. Spend more money to improve. The fact that the Nokia G20 screen doesn’t even reach a Full HD resolution is the primary cause of disappointment here. Instead, you’ll have to make up with 720×1600, or HD+.
True, the Moto G10 has a similarly low resolution, thus this isn’t an oddity in terms of value. Spending a little extra (maybe £35 to £50 – or comparable in US$) to ensure Full HD+ would be a sensible investment, in one’s opinion.
The Nokia G20 is powered by a MediaTek Helio G35 processor with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Overall, that’s a disappointing offering, and there isn’t a higher-spec model available.
Even before anyone gets into the benchmark results, it’s clear that this phone is sluggish. Even simple navigation operations like unlocking the device, booting up as well as switching apps, or navigating between home screens have a slow, willowy feel to them.
But, because you mention it, the benchmark results aren’t that impressive. You can see that the Nokia G20 doesn’t perform much better in the GPU department. Where it is beaten by its Snapdragon-powered competitors.
With the Nokia G20, Nokia hasn’t fully slid back its photography offerings, which is a good thing. On paper, a 48MP broad sensor with an f/1.8 aperture looks good, and users also get a 5MP ultra-wide lens. That 5Mp ultra-wide isn’t all that impressive. We saw ghosting on a basic image of several swans on a cloudy but still bright day, as if they’d entered Matrix-style bullet-time.
However, the ultra-wide sensor is generally more drab and much less vivid than the broad sensor. Especially at the frame’s margins. In excellent daylight, the primary camera is at minimum capable of shooting some decently equitable photos.
Night mode images keep the scene’s tone, but they’re often muddy and grainy, and they don’t lighten things up much.
Selfies are taken with a low-resolution 8MP selfie camera that suffers from light shortages and excesses. When you use the front camera’s portrait mode, the viewfinder strangely blurs out your face, as if you’re not going to be in focus. The resulting images are (relatively) good, but the absence of a proper glimpse is unsettling.
The main camera’s video capture is a very basic 1080p at 30 frames per second. Even the Moto G10 is capable of 60 frames per second.
No, the Nokia G20 is indeed not worth buying because it is a pricey smartphone with an affordable MediaTek Helio G35 SoC. The display is HD+, but the charging support is only 10W, and the cameras are likewise poor. Overall, the POCO M3 Pro or the Redmi Note 10 are superior alternatives to the Nokia G20.
The Nokia G20 makes the final step a little easier. It will never be easier to capture anything you see and hear with its 48 MP quad camera, strong AI image modes, and OZO Audio. All of this is powered by a rechargeable that may last up to three days between charges1.
The Nokia G20 appears to be a straightforward phone with nothing to conceal. It’s inexpensive, and its battery may last up to two days if you don’t use the media too much. This is helpful since you won’t want to use this phone to attack the media. With its grainy 720p resolution and modest 60Hz refresh rate, the G20’s LCD display doesn’t exactly make video or gaming content sing.
A MediaTek Helio G35 CPU, on the other hand, assures that whatever gaming you do engage in will be light and casual in nature. This is also good, although even basic navigation can be slow and choppy in this environment.
Nokia’s minimalist commitment to Android software is admirable, especially given the company’s strong commitment to frequent upgrades. However, You may cringe when you consider how the Nokia G20 is going to operate in two or three years.
Finally, this is a fairly inexpensive phone, so I can’t be too harsh. However, for the same money, you may receive greater results, and investing a little more will result in considerable increases in all sectors.
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