We’re in the middle of an Android tablet resurgence—no, seriously—and following recent devices from Samsung, Walmart, Xiaomi, and Lenovo, HMD is up next with its first-ever tablet, the Nokia T20. Nokia is tackling the lower end of the market by releasing a $249.99 tablet with a 10.4-inch display.
Let’s talk about the specs. The SoC is a Unisoc Tiger T610 (a Unisoc SoC is a rare component); it’s a 12 nm chip with two A75 cores at 1.8 GHz and six A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. The main A75 cores are pretty old and were last seen in major flagships with the Snapdragon 845 in 2017, so this is an entry-level chip. There are 4GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a pretty big 8200 mAh battery. The display is a 10.4-inch LCD with a 2000×1200 resolution and a “toughened glass” (read: not the usual Gorilla Glass) cover. The back is aluminum, and there’s a microSD slot, stereo speakers, a front and back camera, a USB-C port with 15 W charging, and a headphone jack. There’s no fingerprint sensor.
$249.99 gets you the Wi-Fi-only model, but an unpriced LTE version is also listed on the spec page. Nokia is selling a kickstand folio case for an unknown amount. The device ships with Android 11 and comes with two years of major OS updates and three years of security updates.
One interesting design decision concerns the Nokia T20’s headphone jack, which is… uh, mounted in the corner? The bottom-right corner houses the headphone jack at what looks like a 45-degree angle. Is this going to work? People hold their tablets by the bottom corners sometimes, so won’t this get in the way? I suppose you could hold the tablet upside down, but then you’ll be holding the device at the camera lens. Hopefully HMD made sure that most headphone plugs don’t hit the table when using a kickstand folio case.
Regardless, it’s great to see Android tablets making a comeback, especially with foldables pushing the form factor forward on phones and Google’s renewed tablet interest with Android 12.1 and Entertainment Space. Now we just need more big-screen apps. Please, developers?