After a long hiatus, Nokia has returned to the tablet market. Its first new offering, the Nokia T20 ($249.99), is an affordable tablet for basic tasks that’s also optimized for commercial use. We like its long-lasting battery, good build quality, and Nokia’s commitment to several years of software updates. But we simply can’t recommend the T20 because of its truly lackluster display. Our Editors’ Choice winner for affordable tablets, the $259.99 Lenovo Tab P11 Plus, has a much better screen and top-notch speakers for nearly the same price.
It Looks Like a Big Nokia Phone
Nokia’s smartphone portfolio is known for its pragmatic design language, and the T20 maintains this tradition, albeit in tablet form. From its thick bezels to its matte blue aluminum back panel, everything about this tablet looks and feels like a supersized Nokia smartphone.
At 9.7 by 6.2 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and 16.6 ounces, the T20 is light enough to use comfortably for extended periods and slim enough to slide into your bag. The weight is evenly distributed, while the textured aluminum back adds a little extra grip.
A 10.4-inch LCD sits on the front. Although it sports the same 2,000-by-1,200 pixel resolution as the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus, the screen doesn’t appear nearly as crisp, and we noticed pixelation around app icons, even from a distance. In addition, viewing angles are poor and the screen has a very cool, blue-leaning color tone. We’ve noticed similar issues with many of Nokia’s budget phones ever since HMD, the company that owns Nokia, started farming out most of its products to ODMs a few years ago.
You can adjust the screen’s white balance in the settings, but doing so doesn’t help much. And the adaptive brightness mode is so sensitive that we ultimately turned it off after the brightness changed drastically every time we tilted the tablet by a few degrees. Lastly, the Eye Comfort mode doesn’t work in conjunction with custom white balance settings, and gives the display a custom color profile that can best be described as tobacco-stained. The only positive thing we can say about the T20’s display is that it’s bright enough to see in direct sunlight.
A small oval camera module sits in the upper left corner of the back of the tablet, while a Nokia logo appears in the center. The top edge includes a power button and a small speaker grille. Like the similarly priced Lenovo Tab P11 Plus, Nokia doesn’t integrate a fingerprint sensor into the power button, so you have to rely on a PIN, a passcode, or Android’s iffy Face Unlock feature to secure the device.
The left edge of the tablet is bare, while the right side houses a volume rocker, a microSD slot, and a few tiny holes we can only guess are for specialized accessories, though none are offered on Nokia’s site. The microSD tray looks like it has room for a SIM, but the US version of the T20 doesn’t support cellular connectivity.
The bottom edge is home to a USB-C charging port and an additional speaker grille, while a 3.5mm headphone jack sits on the curved bottom left corner. We think this is the perfect spot for a headphone jack because it’s less conducive to water damage than top-mounted alternatives, and far enough away from the USB-C port to prevent your headphone cord from tangling with the charging cable.
Although they’re no match for those on the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus, the T20’s OZO-tuned stereo speakers sound surprisingly good. With a maximum volume of 92dB, the tablet can easily fill a room with audio. The speakers produce a limited soundstage and tend to push the mids slightly forward, but the lower and upper frequencies never come across muffled or thin. Bluetooth 5.0 is also onboard for wireless audio.
Capable Performance, Long Battery Life
A Unisoc T610 SoC and 4GB of RAM power the T20. The 64GB variant of the tablet that we tested had about 50GB of storage available out of the box. If you need more space, you can add up to 512GB via the microSD card slot.
If you’ve never heard of Unisoc, you’re not alone. While Qualcomm and MediaTek dominate the US smartphone and tablet market, Unisoc is a major player in the budget market throughout most of the world. It’s difficult to draw direct comparisons between chipsets from different manufacturers, because several have the same core configuration and clock speeds; coprocessors and instruction sets for AI and ML tasks tend to be the differentiators. If we had to compare the Unisoc T610 with another chipset, we’d say the Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 is pretty close in terms of performance.
In any case, apps open quickly on the T20 and we didn’t notice any lag when swiping between screens. We also didn’t experience any slowdown with over a dozen apps running in the background. You might notice some caching, however, once you open more than a dozen Chrome tabs.
It’s difficult to recommend the T20 for gaming, simply because the display is so lackluster, but the tablet is sufficiently powerful for casual games; we played Alto’s Odyssey for over an hour and didn’t notice a single skipped frame or any lag. On the other hand, Genshin Impact, an extremely hardware-intensive mobile game, was slow to load and we noticed intermittent lag and skipped frames.
While benchmarks aren’t indicative of everyday performance, they’re useful for quantifying differences between devices. On Geekbench 5, a suite of tests that measures raw power, the T20 earned a score of 347 for single-core performance (SC) and 1,542 for multi-core performance (MC). That’s not as good as the scores we recorded for the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus (500 SC/1,592 MC) or the TCL Tab Pro 5G (521 SC/1,762 MC). And if playing games is your main concern, the $329 Apple iPad easily outperforms every budget Android tablet we’ve tested.
The T20’s 8MP rear camera isn’t anything special; it’s fine for scanning documents or QR codes and for taking quick reference shots. The sensor works best in environments with plenty of light, but even then it won’t outclass your smartphone camera. The 5MP front-facing camera handles conference calls pretty well in good light, but stutters in lower-light situations. On our daytime Zoom tests, we observed slight ghosting and the background looked a little flat, but those effects aren’t serious enough to cause issues on calls.
The tablet supports dual-band Wi-Fi; we tested it on Verizon’s 5G Home Internet router over a 5GHz connection. At a distance of 10 feet from the router, speeds averaged 135Mbps down and 24.1Mbps up. From 25 feet away, speeds decreased to an average of 77.4Mbps down and 16.8Mbps up. An iPhone 13 Pro Max connected to the router averaged 489.4Mbps/28.4Mbps and 424Mbps/20.1Mbps respectively at distances of 10 and 25 feet.
A hearty 8,200mAh battery inside the T20 can easily get you through a day of heavy use. In our battery drain test, in which we stream HD video over Wi-Fi at full brightness, the T20 lasted for 10 hours and 6 minutes before shutting down. Recharging, however, is a slow affair if you use the 10W adapter that comes in the box; you can speed the process up a little with an optional 15W power adapter.
Updates to Android 13
Although the T20 ships with a stock version of Android 11, an Android 12L (Google’s OS specifically for devices with large screen) update is currently in the works. We don’t know the exact release date for this update, but HMD mentioned it in a briefing for the tablet.
Notably, the T20 is one of a handful of tablets that are part of the Android Enterprise program. This means that businesses can use the T20 with additional device management tools, such as one-touch enrollment, and even compartmentalize work and personal profiles.
Expect a minimum of two years of OS upgrades and three years of monthly security updates. While the OS upgrade policy isn’t quite as generous as what Samsung promises for its newer tablets (not to mention any Apple tablet), it’s better than the current upgrade roadmap for the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus.
A Decent Tablet Held Back by a Weak Display
The Nokia T20 gets a lot right. It’s built well, offers solid performance for the price, and has a big battery to get you through a full day of use. Unfortunately, the quality of its display pretty much overshadows all of these positive aspects. As such, our top pick for affordable Android tablets remains the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus, offering a superior 11-inch display, immersive speakers, and optional keyboard and stylus accessories for about the same price. If you aren’t committed to Android, meanwhile, Apple’s entry-level iPad offers a better experience all around for under $100 more.
