Nokia T20 Tablet : Plenty of Peaks and Valleys

Overall, the Nokia T20 does a pretty good job as a media streamer and can even be a productivity machine. Let’s dive into it.

Design and display

The Nokia T20 tablet has a glass and aluminum construction, so you won’t mistake it for a budget device. The Deep Ocean colourway on the back is a nice shade of blue. It gives the tablet an overall understated, classic look that you would want in a coffee table tablet. One downside is that the screen doesn’t get bright enough for outdoor use. Otherwise it’s a sharp 10.4-inch diagonal with 1200 x 2000 resolution, resulting in a weird 5: 3 aspect ratio. That puts it between 16: 9, which is great for watching movies. , and 2: 3, which is great for productivity.

The aspect ratio means the tablet is awkward to hold for reading in the Kindle app. It is too wide and too tall to hold with one hand in any orientation. That leaves you holding the tablet with both hands or placing 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 the widescreen format is pretty common on TVs too.

In landscape orientation, you will find the power button in the upper left corner. The volume control is at the top of the same corner. You can expand the 32 or 64 GB of internal storage with a microSD slot in the upper right. The stereo speakers on either side put out good sound that is not as loud as I would like. There is a headphone jack in a strange place on 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 for charging and data on the right side.

The power button is somewhat inconveniently positioned as I found myself accidentally turning off the tablet when gaming or simply holding the tablet with both hands. That gets really annoying when playing games or reading. That, combined with the weight, means this tablet will stand out when you can put it on a stand and watch a video, or when you plug in a wireless keyboard to type something light. This is exactly how I wrote this review actually.

Performance, battery and camera

This section is going to be where I will highlight the ups and downs of this tablet. What is important to remember here is the price. While the price doesn’t compare very favorably to that of a Fire tablet, it is very favorable compared to even a base iPad model. But that favorable price comes with a few compromises.

To put it bluntly, performance and battery aren’t particularly good. While the tablet can run games like Call of Duty: Mobile pretty good, loading the game is very slow. Applications tend to lag when you start them, and even when you change them while multitasking.

Network connectivity is not very good either. Sometimes the tablet had trouble playing or resuming a video stream on my home Wi-Fi network. I tested it on my iPad or Lenovo Tab 13 Yoga when that happened. Neither of them had a problem playing the same content at the same time. Add to that the performance lag, and that doesn’t mean a good thing for the hardware.

The battery is an 8,200 mAh battery, which lasts for about a day to a day and a half. If you’re streaming videos or gaming, that will drain your battery pretty quickly. After 30 minutes of each Netflix stream at 75% brightness and playback Call of Duty: Mobile, the battery sat at 80%. By contrast, most phones can do both, along with 30 minutes of browsing, with more left in the tank.

Battery life isn’t terrible, but it’s not among the best either. I often found myself picking up the tablet in the morning, only to find the battery near 25%. A good tablet will generally give you two full days. This one doesn’t quite go there, so remember to plug it in at night.

As for the cameras, there are two. You get a 5-megapixel shooter on the front, which is clear and great for video calls and the like. There is an 8MP shooter on the back, which is fine for scanning documents or QR codes. By the way, those are the only acceptable uses for a tablet camera. Please don’t be the person who picks up your slate to record a concert.

software

The Nokia T20 software is pretty close to Google’s experience. That’s a good thing because there isn’t a lot of extra bloatware taking up space. I turned on gesture navigation right away, because that’s how I roll. Unfortunately, on a tablet it takes several seconds for multitasking to appear when using gesture navigation. It takes so long that I often have to remind myself that I’m actually doing it right. Since I’ve seen this phenomenon on other tablets, I can assume this is something from Android, not Google. That doesn’t make it any less annoying.

A delicious piece of software is also a standard Google component. The Google TV hub is pretty impressive. It is a combination of the various services that you are registered for that you can select content for you to 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 content consuming machines, first and foremost.

As I mentioned earlier, you can use the tablet as a productivity machine, but there is no software here that allows it, like on the Lenovo Tab 11 Plus. Also, just because you can do something on this tablet doesn’t mean you should.

Other aspects of the software sing the same chorus that they have sung for years. Android apps are not optimized for a tablet screen. Hopefully Android 12L (if it’s this tablet) will fix that problem. But for now, all you can hope for are normal Android apps extended to cover a wider area. However, that is not Nokia’s fault; that’s Google’s fault, and it’s about time Google fixed it. What would be Nokia’s fault would be if this tablet never sees Android 12L. Nokia isn’t exactly known for its software updates, and while Nokia promises three years of security updates, it wouldn’t hold its breath for operating system updates.

Price and availability

The Nokia T20 tablet is available in the US for $ 249 on Nokia.com or 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; the global launch does.

Our take

Overall, this is a nice coffee table tablet that is good for consuming content and some games. It lives in that strange space between being more useful than an Amazon Fire tablet and less expensive than an iPad. It’s an amazing tablet that gives you a good screen for watching movies, and in a pinch it can even help you get your work done productive.

While it’s good for the price, if you really want a great tablet, spend around $ 100 more and get a 9th-gen iPad. If you just want a movie tablet and a game or two, get an Amazon Fire. But if you want something that will fill the gap and allow you to use Google services, the use of which cannot be overstated, then this is a good tablet to choose from that won’t break the bank. Just don’t expect an amazing app experience or software updates.

Is there a better alternative?

Of course. 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, though if you want to stay in the under $ 500 category, look out for the iPad Mini. This is an area where Apple has locked the field and the Nokia T20 does nothing to change that fact. It’s not a terrible tablet, but it’s not a good one either.

How long will it last?

The aluminum construction feels sturdy. Assuming no accidental drops or spills, the hardware should last quite a long time. However, we can offer zero guarantees on software updates and the track record is not on Nokia’s side. Nokia promises three years of security updates, so that’s it. What we can promise is that with this tablet you will get your money’s worth over its lifetime.

Should you buy it?

No. But that is the answer we will give you for almost all the Android tablets that we review. Google just isn’t there yet, but there’s hope on the horizon. If Google is serious about Android 12L, that may change the conversation. Android is a wonderful operating system on phones, but the experience doesn’t translate well to larger screens, and it’s a shame that foldable phones were necessary for Google to finally figure that out.