The iPad and Amazon Fire tablets dominate the Android tablet market, but the Nokia T20 is worth considering. If you want a tablet that is less expensive than an iPad but more functional than an Amazon Fire, the Nokia T20 is an excellent budget option with only a few small drawbacks.
Access to Google services and the app store is one of the advantages of utilizing an Android tablet. Gmail, Maps, and Drive are essential components of my workflow. While most Android apps aren’t designed for tablet use, the Play Store is a far superior software ecosystem to Amazon’s app store. Furthermore, Google just announced Android 12L, which is built for tablets and foldable devices, indicating Google’s interest in supporting the form factor. As a result, now might be a good moment to join the Android tablet bandwagon.
Overall, the Nokia T20 performs admirably as a media streamer and can even be considered a productivity machine. Let’s get started.
Nokia T20 Tablet Design and Display
The Nokia T20 tablet is made of glass and aluminum, and it is not a low-cost device. The Deep Ocean color on the back is a nice shade of blue. It provides the tablet with a traditional and subtle appearance that you would expect from a coffee table tablet. One disadvantage is that the display does not get bright enough to be used outside. Aside from that, it’s a sharp 10.4-inch diagonal with a 1200 x 2000 resolution and an odd 5:3 aspect ratio. This places it somewhere between 16:9, which is ideal for watching movies, and 2:3, which is ideal for productivity.
Because of the aspect ratio, the tablet is difficult to hold while reading in the Kindle app. It’s too large and tall to hold in either orientation with one hand. That leaves you with the option of holding the tablet with both hands or placing it on a table to view movies or television. When it comes to watching movies, most have black bars on the top and bottom, but they’re not distracting because letterboxing is widespread on TVs as well.
In landscape mode, the power button is located in the upper-left corner. The volume control is located on the top, in the same corner. A microSD card on the top-right side allows you to expand the 32 or 64GB of internal storage. The dual speakers on either side produce nice sound, though not as loud as I’d prefer. A headphone jack is located in an unusual location in the tablet’s rounded corner. I didn’t expect to find it there, and for the first week, I didn’t even see it. Finally, there is a single USB-C connector for charging and data on the right side.
The power button is in an inconvenient location, as I found myself accidentally turning off the tablet while gaming or simply holding it with two hands. That is highly irritating when playing a game or reading. This, paired with the weight, means that this tablet will shine when you set it up on a stand to watch a video or attach a Bluetooth keyboard for some light writing. In fact, that’s exactly how I wrote this review.
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Nokia T20 Tablet Software
The software of the Nokia T20 is very similar to the Google experience. That’s a good thing because there isn’t much bloatware sucking up space. I immediately enabled gesture navigation because that’s how I roll. Unfortunately, while utilizing gesture navigation on a tablet, multitasking takes several seconds to appear. It takes so long that I frequently have to assure myself that I am, in fact, doing it correctly. Because I’ve seen similar occurrences on other tablets, I’m assuming it’s an Android phenomenon rather than a Google phenomenon. That doesn’t make it any less vexing.
One enjoyable feature of the software is also a standard Google component. The Google TV hub is fantastic. It’s a mash-up of the many services you’ve subscribed to that may curate material for you to watch from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and others. While I do miss the Google News stream, this is an adequate substitute, especially given the nature of Android tablets. They are, first and foremost, content consumption machines.
As previously stated, the tablet can be used as a productivity machine, but there is no software to facilitate this, as there is on the Lenovo Tab 11 Plus. Furthermore, simply because you can do something on this tablet does not mean you should.
Other portions of the software repeat the same mantra that they have for years. Android apps aren’t designed for tablet screens. Hopefully, Android 12L (assuming it makes it to this tablet) will address this issue. But for the time being, all you can anticipate are standard Android apps stretched out to span a larger space. That, however, is not Nokia’s problem; it is Google’s mistake, and it is past time for Google to rectify it. It would be Nokia’s fault if this tablet never received Android 12L. Nokia isn’t known for its software upgrades, and while the company guarantees three years of security patches, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for OS changes.
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Performance, battery, and camera
This section will outline the tablet’s advantages and disadvantages. The pricing point is critical to note here. While the pricing does not compare well to a Fire tablet, it does compare favorably to even a base model iPad. However, that low price comes with certain drawbacks.
To put it bluntly, performance and battery life are subpar. While the tablet is capable of running games such as Call of Duty: Mobile, loading the game is extremely slow. Apps lag when you launch them and even when you switch back to them when multitasking.
Network connectivity is also subpar. On my mesh home Wi-Fi, the tablet occasionally had trouble playing or resuming a video stream. When that happened, I tested it on either my iPad or my Lenovo Tab 13 Yoga. Both had no problems playing the same content at the same time. Add the performance lag, and things aren’t looking good for the hardware.
The battery is an 8,200mAh battery pack, which is good for about a day to a day and a half. If you’re streaming videos or gaming, that’s going to chew through the battery pretty quickly. The battery was at 80 percent after 30 minutes of streaming Netflix at 75 percent brightness and playing Call of Duty: Mobile. In comparison, most phones can accomplish both of those things, as well as 30 minutes of navigation, and still have juice left in the tank.
The battery life isn’t horrible, but it’s also not among the finest. I frequently found myself picking up the tablet in the morning only to discover that the battery was only about 25% charged. A good tablet will usually last you two days. This one falls short, so remember to charge it at night.
There are two cameras in total. On the front, you get a 5-megapixel shooter that is crisp and ideal for video calls and the like. On the back, there’s an 8MP camera for scanning papers or QR codes. By the way, those are the only approved uses for a tablet camera. Please do not be the person who holds up their slate to record a concert.
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