Nokia X20 Unboxing and Review By Eric Okafor

This phone does not make sense to me and I’d tell you why in a bit. Hey guys, it’s Eric here and this is my Nokia X20 unboxing and review. First of, let’s see what we have in the box. When you open this up, you’re greeted with the smart phone wrapped in plastic. 
Let’s peel this right off This is the nordic blue color, very cheap looking color. It also comes in Midnight sun, which I don’t think is any better.

Sealed tightly here is the SIM ejection tool. Underneath that is get a whole library of get started guide and product and safety leaflets in multiple languages. We can see all the supported bands here including Glo 4G band 28. Of course there’s 5G and NFC support here too. We get this off white textured soft case that is a bit of an acquired taste.

It does look like it offers more protection than the average case but I don’t think I’ve ever opted for an off white case in my life. Also I see what looks like wear and tear right out the box and that is weird. 
Boxed away, you have a ….. wait just the USB type C cable. I think excluding a charger at this price is a recipe for disaster and a lot of people who don’t watch reviews are probably going to consider returning it, just for this reason.

It comes with a screen protector already applied, I suggest replacing it with a tempered glass instead. Moving on On the front, you have a 6.67 inch FHD+ IPS LCD display with 20 by 9 aspect ratio. Right at the top, you have a punch hole that houses a 32 megapixel selfie camera. 

On the back, you have a 64 megapixel quad camera set up with flash and some Nokia branding. On the left you have a dedicated google assistant button and a hybrid tray that holds 2 Nano SIM cards or 1 Sim and an SD Card.

On the right you have your volume rocker and a power button that doubles up as a fingerprint sensor. 
On the top you have a a microphone On the bottom you have a speaker, a USB type C port, a second microphone and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Nokia X20 is unnecessarily huge. Big for nothing if you may, coz the screen is actually not big enough to justify how hefty it is. As far as this familiar Nokia design goes, this is probably the ugliest adaptation that I have seen.

I don’t know if it’s the the plainness of the plastic back and frame or the fact that this ultra ugly color attracts fingerprint smudges or maybe this design is tired and the design team needs to get to work. It’s a good thing that the case isn’t transparent tho. 

 On the front, we get thick looking bezels and a chin. These bezels are too much, even for Nokia, like common. On the bright side, that this is still one of the best looking LCD displays that I’ve seen on a midrange phone.

The viewing angles are exceptional and outdoor visibility is excellent. The exact opposite of what you get on the latest Infinix and TECNO phones. 

Perfect for consuming content in 1080P and the camera cut out isn’t at all obtrusive. 
My review unit comes with 128 Gigs of storage and 8 gigs of ram. You get about 112 Gigs of available storage.



We get Android 11 and it is stock android in every sense of the world. Very clean interface. We don’t even get YouTube Music preinstalled, that is how bloatware free the X20 is. 
We’re promised 3 years of updates and that means we’d get Android 12 and 13. We get a full quick settings with all the essentials.



The user experience is just so buttery smooth. I did not in any way feel like 90hz was missing from this guy, just by scrolling through and playing around in the settings. I warmed up to gestures recently because of the Pixel 5 and using gestures on here actually felt really good and I have no complaints. 
There’s not to tweak about this display because there’s no higher refresh rate or the pure display setting that we saw on the 8.3 5G. 

That Google assistant button only performs that one function but it can be disabled.

I suggest you do just that. 
The Nokia X20 uses the Snapdragon 480 5G Octa-Core CPU clocked at 2.0GHZ. The 400 series naming scheme may suggest that it is a low end chipset but in reality, it is similar to the Snapdragon 732G + it even has a better GPU. In my day to day use, this phone felt really smooth throughout, opening apps, multi tasking oh and that excellent RAM management that just makes you wonder how many apps it can actually hold in memory. It’s a shame that I can’t recommend it, despite how great it performs.

I’d tell you why in my conclusion. 
The fingerprint sensor is a little bit sluggish, probably because of the animation but in terms of accuracy, it’s great. Same story for face unlock. It also unlocks in pitch darkness and with your sideview. Yep it’s one the aggressive but less secure methods of unlocking your phone.

Here’s how the speaker compares side by side the Vivo V21. 

When it comes to gaming, as usual I played PUBG on HD graphics and high frame rates, the highest PUBG setting for this phone. Gaming on a phone this size is supposed to be enjoyable but gaming is where you might feel the absence of the high refresh and touch sampling rates, as well as a front firing speaker. I enjoyed gaming on this phone nonetheless. I even loaded up fortnite.

You guys know that Fortnite doesn’t run on just any chipset. Even though this isn’t a gaming phone, Fortnite runs fairly well. It is powered by a 4470mAh battery which is about average, for 2021, which makes little sense, considering how heavy this phone is. I put it through my usual battery test, about 5 hours of PUBG, 2 hours on Facebook, 1 hour on Twitter and Instagram etc all on WiFi. 
This gave me over 10+ hours of screen on time with 9% left to spare.

It should last the average user a full day but I’ve seen 4000mAh batteries crush these numbers easily, so I’m not so impressed. 
It took me about 40mins to charge to 50% and approximately 2 hours and 23 minutes for a full charge with a 33 watt fast charger. However it only supports 18W fast charging so using a faster charger is redundant. 
When it comes to the Camera, the X20 has it all in terms of features. It even has the cinema mode that we first saw on the Nokia 8.3 5G. The max settings are hidden in the aspect ratio and that is what I used throughout.

Let’s see some photos. Outdoors the selfie camera is not bad. Great exposure levels but it looks a little saturated, you can tell by how orangey everything looks. Also, it is not very detailed for a 32megapixel shot. 

Using portrait mode, we see a different color profile but I quite like the depth sensing capabilities.

With the primary camera, there’s this weird oversharpening of my beard, which isn’t actually grey in real life. Perhaps overzealous HDR setting. Again, this isn’t a very detailed photo for a 64 Megapixel lens. Now I compared the 64megapixel shot to the default mode and there’s actually a difference. High Dynamic range is of course doing the mostest.

Shooting landscapes is where this camera thrives. 

Using wide angle lens, the quality dips by a lot. 

I think this camera generally does better when the subject does not include a human face. But you can see that it is prone to over exposure. 
I know you’re wondering about GCAM for this phone.

I tested it out and from the results, it looks like GCAM is not going to save the X20’s camera. I tried more than 3 versions and the results did not look as good as the default camera, which is actually worse than it sounds coz the default camera is so so and that is what you’re stuck with. Indoors, the selfie camera just looks like a bad joke, very dark and grainy which is usually the opposite of selfie cameras. Surely this cannot be midrange quality. The Primary camera however does a really good job.

Skin tones and texture are definitely great for a midrange. 

The depth sensing of this phone is actually good. It’s a shame that the selfie camera is nothing to write home about. Using screen flash in a Pitch dark room hmm best case scenario, you will look like ghost if your complexion is close to mine. The night mode on this phone is bare minimum.

Not bright enough and too grainy. Makes no sense. It records videos in 1080P from the primary and selfie camera Aside the uninspired design and color, the Nokia X20’s camera is a huge disappointment because we’ve seen way better from Nokia at more affordable prices. The 32 and 64megapixel lenses are bull sheet and it just begs the question what were HMD Global thinking? Moreso it’s not cool or trendy or sensible to not include a charger in the box of a midrange phone and Nokia doesn’t get to be the first to do that successfully. If they really wanted to save the environment, they should have left out the insane amount of literature.



Another thing is the idea behind a midrange 5G phone is great but for most of us, it’s way ahead of its time. There’s also no guarantee that 5G will become commercially available in this part of the World any time soon. HMD Global could at the very least had priced this accordingly but no, it’s priced at N155,400 Naira which converts to $320 USD and I do not recommend it to existing Nokia 7.2 users or anyone alive. I mean, if I had haters, I’d recommend it to them coz the X20 is probably one of the worst phones you can buy for $300 dollars. 

For now Nokia has no other models around this price with fairly powerful midrange processors.

All roads lead to Redmi Note 10 pro or Samsung Galaxy A52 at this point, check out our comparison video. I’d be leaving a link up above. 
I’d like to know your thoughts about the X20, in the comments. 
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it, also follow me on Twitter or Instagram to see what i’m up to. Do subscribe for more videos like this as it will mean a lot to me and i’ll see you in the next one.

Peace. 
.

Source : Eric Okafor