The Nokia X20 brings 5G phones to $415 | GeekComparison

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  • The Nokia X20, with a beautiful standard Android home screen.

    HMD

  • The back.

    HMD

  • Four cameras seems like too many cameras for a mid-range phone, but there are four cameras.

    HMD

  • The bottom has a headphone jack and a USB-C port.

    HMD

  • It comes in blue and gold.

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  • The dimensions.

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HMD announced a big stack of smartphones yesterday, the most interesting of which is the Nokia X20, a €349 ($415) device that looks destined for wide distribution. HMD’s “Nokia X” line represents a new model number scheme for the company, which previously used decimal numbers such as “6.1”. The Nokia X model is dusted off from when Microsoft first started selling Android phones (not the second time Microsoft started selling Android phones).

The main feature of the X20 is Qualcomm’s brand new Snapdragon 480 SoC, which was just announced in January. The Snapdragon 480 is an 8nm chip, with two 2GHz Arm Cortex A76 CPUs and six 1.8GHz Cortex A55 CPUs. This is Qualcomm’s first low-end SoC to support 5G, if that does anything for you, and there’s even an option (although Nokia didn’t use it on the X20) for mmWave antennas. More importantly, Qualcomm says the CPU and GPU should be twice as fast as the old Snapdragon 460.

The other big news of the day is that Nokia is now extending support to three years, with three years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates. Previously, the company did two years of major updates. It seems like everyone – even lame duck manufacturers like LG – are expanding their Android support lately.

The rest of the specs include a 6.67-inch, 2400×1080 LCD, 6GB RAM, 128GB storage, a 4470mAh battery and Android 11. You get a fingerprint sensor on the side, NFC, a headphone jack, a microSD slot, and dual-band Wi-Fi support up to 802.11ac. There is an inordinate amount of cameras on the rear, with a 64MP main camera, a 5MP ultra-wide camera, a 2MP depth camera and a 2MP macro camera. On the front, you get a 32MP camera in a circular cutout.

Nokia also has a cheaper variant of the X20, called the X10. It has an identical design and largely similar specs, except you downgrade to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The main camera on the back changes to a cheaper 48 MP main sensor and the front uses an 8 MP sensor. It starts at €309, or $367.

There’s no word on a US release yet, but HMD’s Nokia phones with Qualcomm SoCs usually make it to the US eventually. The X10 and X20 will be released in Europe from May.

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