Several years after HMD resurrected the Nokia brand with a solid lineup of budget phones, the company is dipping its toes in the tablet market. This morning, HMD announced the Nokia T20, it’s first Android tablet in six years.
The budget-friendly T20 sports the same understated aesthetic as Nokia’s smartphone lineup. Its textured aluminum frame comes in dark blue, there’s a small camera module poking out from the top-left corner with an 8MP sensor, and prominent Nokia branding in the center of the tablet.
The front is dominated by a 10.4-inch, 2,000-by-1,200-pixel LCD made of strengthened glass. Typical brightness maxes out at 400 nits and there’s no mention of an antireflective coating, so it’s best-suited for indoor use. Chunky bezels frame the display, and a 5MP selfie-camera is hidden in the top bezel for video calls.
A pair of OZO-tuned speakers should work well for said video calls, but if you’d prefer to have a private conversation, Bluetooth 5.0 support is baked in. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack, leaving no shortage of audio options.
There’s no NFC but that doesn’t seem like a deal breaker for a budget tablet. Also missing in action is a fingerprint sensor. Of course, you can use a PIN or face unlock to secure the T20, but both options are less convenient than tapping your finger against the power button.
The T20 is powered by a Unisoc T610 chipset. In the US, HMD will sell the slate with 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. That storage and RAM configuration is bare bones for an Android tablet, but there’s a microSD slot that supports up to an additional 512GB of external storage.
HMD packed a massive 8,200mAh battery into the T20. It claims you’ll get up to seven hours of battery life for video calls and more than twice that with more conservative use. There’s a 10W charger in the box, but you can speed up the process with an optional 15W power adapter.
The T20 has two primary use cases. The first is as an inexpensive secondary device for content consumption, online learning, and light multitasking. The retail version ships with Google Kids Space, ExpressVPN, and Spotify.
Since the T20 is an Android Recommended Device, it’s also an inexpensive option for enterprise use. Companies can use HMD Enable Pro to deploy and update the tablet across large fleets.
What sets the Nokia T20 apart from other budget tablets, however, is HMD’s software upgrade policy. While most inexpensive tablets ship with bloatware-filled versions of Android that never get updates, the T20 ships with a stock version of Android 11. HMD also promises two major OS upgrades as well as two years of security patches.
The Nokia T20 will sell for $249.99 in the US starting Nov. 17