Nokia T20 Tablet Review: Plenty of Peaks and Valleys
"The Nokia T20 tablet is a decent tablet that is better than a Fire tablet and cheaper than an iPad, but that's all it offers."
advantages
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Nice design with nice color
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Good price
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Decent performance
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The Google TV hub is pretty awesome
disadvantage
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Poor network connectivity and battery life
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Screen is not bright enough.
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Volume is not loud enough
The Android tablet market is largely dominated by iPads and Amazon Fire tablets, but the Nokia T20 is worth considering. If you're looking for a tablet that's cheaper than an iPad but more useful than an Amazon Fire, the Nokia T20 is a good budget option with just a few minor pitfalls.
One of the (only) advantages of using an Android tablet (as opposed to a Fire) is access to Google services and the App Store. Gmail, Maps and Drive are central to my workflow. And while most Android apps aren't ideal for the tablet form factor, the Play Store is a much better app ecosystem than Amazon's App Store. Also, Google recently launched Android 12L, which is designed for tablets and is foldable, indicating Google's interest in form factor support. So now could be a good time to jump on the Android tablet bandwagon.
Overall, the Nokia T20 does a pretty good job as a media streamer and can even turn into a productivity machine. Let's dive in.
Design and display
The Nokia T20 tablet has a glass and aluminum construction so you won't confuse it with a budget device. The deep ocean colorway on the back is a pleasant shade of blue. It gives the tablet an overall classic and subtle look that you would want from a coffee table tablet. One disadvantage is that the display is not bright enough for outdoor use. Otherwise, it's a sharp 10.4-inch diagonal with a resolution of 1200 x 2000, resulting in an odd aspect ratio of 5: 3. That puts it somewhere between 16: 9, which is great for watching movies, and 2: 3, which is great for productivity.
This tablet does a pretty good job as a media streamer and can even turn a case into a productivity machine.
The aspect ratio means that the tablet is awkward to hold to read in the Kindle app. It's too wide and too big to hold with one hand in any orientation. So you can either hold the tablet with both hands or place it on a table to watch movies or TV. Speaking of watching movies, most have black bars at the top and bottom, but they're not distracting as letterboxing is also common on TVs.
In landscape mode you will find the power button in the upper left corner. The volume rocker is at the top in the same corner. You can expand the 32 or 64 GB internal storage with a microSD slot on the top right. Stereo speakers on both sides deliver good sound that isn't quite as loud as I'd like. There is a headphone jack in a strange place in the rounded corner of the tablet. I didn't expect to find it there, so much so that I didn't even notice it for the first week. Finally, there is a single USB-C port on the right for charging and data.
The power button is placed a bit inconveniently because I accidentally switched off the tablet while playing or only held the tablet with two hands. That gets really annoying when playing or reading. Combined with the weight, this means this tablet excels when you can put the tablet on a stand and watch a video, or when you plug in a wireless keyboard for easy typing. That's exactly how I wrote this review.
Performance, battery and camera
In this section, I'm going to highlight the ups and downs of this tablet. What is important here is the price. While the price tag isn't all that cheap with a Fire tablet, it's very cheap even when compared to a base model of the iPad. But this low price comes with some compromises.
To be honest, the performance and battery are not great. While the tablet can run games like Call of Duty: Mobile pretty well, the game loads very slowly. Apps tend to lag on launch and even if you switch back to them while multitasking.
Network connectivity isn't great either. The tablet sometimes had problems playing or resuming a video stream on my mesh home WiFi. I was testing it on either my iPad or Lenovo Tab 13 Yoga when this happened. Both had no problem playing the same content at the same time. Add to this the performance lag, and that doesn't mean good things for hardware.
The battery is an 8,200 mAh battery that lasts for about one to one and a half days. When you stream or play videos, the battery chews through pretty quickly. After 30 minutes of streaming Netflix at 75% brightness and playing Call of Duty: Mobile, the battery was 80%. In contrast, most phones can do both activities along with 30 minutes of navigation and have more in the tank.
A good pill usually gives you a solid two days. This is not enough, so remember to plug it in at night.
The battery life isn't bad, but it's not the best either. I often found myself picking up the tablet in the morning only to find the battery at almost 25%. A good pill usually gives you a solid two days. This is not enough, so remember to plug it in at night.
As for the cameras, there are two. On the front, you get a 5 mega-pixel shooter that is clear and great for video calls and the like. On the back there is an 8MP shooter that is suitable for scanning documents or QR codes. These are the only acceptable uses for a tablet camera, by the way. Please don't be the person holding up your slate to record a concert.
software
The software on the Nokia T20 is pretty close to a standard Google experience. That's a good thing, too, because there isn't a lot of additional bloatware that takes up space. I activated the gesture navigation right away because that's how I roll. Unfortunately, on a tablet, it takes several seconds to display multitasking when using gesture navigation. It takes so long that I often have to remind myself that I'm actually doing it right. Having seen this phenomenon on other tablets, I can assume this is an Android thing, not a Google thing. That doesn't make it any less of a nuisance.
A nice part of the software is also a Google component. The Google TV hub is pretty awesome. It's a combination of the different services that you've signed up for and can curate the content for you, which you can watch from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and others. While I certainly miss the Google News feed, this is an acceptable replacement, especially given the nature of Android tablets. They are primarily content consumer machines.
As mentioned earlier, you can use the tablet as a productivity machine, but there is no software here to make it possible like there is on the Lenovo Tab 11 Plus. Also, it doesn't mean you should be doing something just because you can do something on this tablet.
A nice part of the software is also a Google component. The Google TV hub is pretty awesome.
Other aspects of the software are singing the same chorus they have been singing for years. Android apps are not optimized for a tablet screen. Hopefully Android 12L (when it comes to this tablet) will fix this problem. But for now, you can only expect regular Android apps that cover a larger area. That is not Nokia's fault, however; this is google's fault and it is high time google fixed it. What would Nokia's fault be if this tablet never saw Android 12L. Nokia isn't exactly known for its software updates, and while Nokia promises three years of security updates, I wouldn't be holding my breath for OS updates.
Price and availability
The Nokia T20 tablet is available in the US for $ 249 from Nokia.com or. available Amazon. In the UK, prices start at £ 199. The main difference between the US version of the tablet and the global version is in the LTE connectivity. The US tablet doesn't have that; global publishing does.
Our opinion
Overall, this is a nice coffee table tablet that is good for content consuming and some gaming. It lives in that strange space between being more useful than an Amazon Fire tablet and less expensive than an iPad. It's a stunning tablet that can give you a good screen for watching movies and, in a pinch, can even help you get productive work done.
While it's good for the price, if you really want a great tablet, spend about $ 100 more and get a 9th generation iPad. If all you want is a tablet for movies and a game or two, get an Amazon Fire. But if you want something that bridges the gap and lets you use Google services that can't be overrated, then this is a good tablet that won't break the bank. Just don't expect a great app experience or software updates.
Is there a better alternative?
Naturally. Probably the best Android tablet you can buy is the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7. The best tablet you can buy overall is the iPad Pro. However, if you want to stay in the under $ 500 category, check out the iPad Mini. This is one area that Apple has blocked the field and the Nokia T20 doesn't change that fact. It's not a terrible tablet, but it's not really good either.
How long it will take?
The aluminum construction makes a robust impression. Provided there is no accidental spillage or drop, the hardware should last a long time. However, we cannot make any guarantees about software updates, and history is not on Nokia’s side. Nokia promises three years of security updates, so that's it. What we can promise is that you will get your money's worth with this tablet over its entire service life.
Should you buy it?
No. But that's the answer we give you for almost every Android tablet we look at. Google just isn't there yet, but there is hope on the horizon. If Google is serious about Android 12L, that can change the conversation. Android is a wonderful operating system on phones, but the experience doesn't translate well to bigger screens, and it's a shame it took foldable phones to finally make this clear to Google.
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