Design

No real surprises as far as the Nokia G21’s. Design goes with its polycarbonate backend which basically is just a plastic back. And it’s available in two different colors Nordic Blue, and Dusk. You get a textured surface on the back of the phone and it does add a good bit of grip when holding it. This also means that the back of the phone doesn’t pick up points too easily. G21 has something of a 6.5-inch display with a fairly thick bezel surrounding that display. Especially the bottom one.

Display

If you dive on into the display setting of the Nokia G21, you’ve got the usual nightlight for instance, which just helps to filter blue light and makes for an easy on the eye experience. You’ve also got an adaptive screen refresh rate as well. So as you can see there, this can boost the refresh rate up to 90 Hertz when you are enjoying supported content. This 6.5 inched IPS display is a fairly simple panel, not terrible by any means, but not particularly great. See it has 720 x 1600 pixels and a 20:9 ratio (~270 PPI density) resolution, which is not particularly great but just okay. But you know, what, if this is a phone you are getting just for chatting at you about or whatever, you need not worry much about its display. It’ll do the job. Plus for the price, this display is okay.

Platform

With Nokia, G21 comes Android and it’s not the latest freshest Android 12. Unfortunately, it is still Android version 11. But not to worry since this phone will get an update to Android 12 and also Android 13 beyond. Yes, Nokia global has promised two years of OS updates. Also on the design language of this phone is included a dedicated Google Assistance key on the edge of this phone. Nokia G21 has a side-mounted fingerprint sensor just built into that power button. It is pretty dependable, nice, and responsive. And one of the few features added on top of that stock Android experience is face recognition which usually isn’t built-in by default. You’ve got 64 GB of space by default here on the Nokia G21. Although you can upgrade that to 128GB (or up to 512 GB) using a microSDXC (dedicated slot). For its performance, the Nokia G21 is powered by the Unisoc T606 (12 nm) chipset backed by 4GB RAM.

Cameras

Check out the camera tech of the Nokia G21 and what you get is a 50 MP, f/1.8, 28mm (wide), 1/2.76″, 0.64µm, PDAF primary sensor sounds pretty decent as far as the specs go. You also get a 2 MP, (macro), a 2 MP, (depth), and an 8 MP, f/2.0, (wide) selfie camera. There’s no ultra-wide-angle shooter or anything here but portrait mode smarts is definitely on. 1080p@30fps video recording is what the phone is capable of with both the main camera and selfie camera which is a plus at the price point.

Battery

So for the battery life and what you’ve got packed inside of Nokia G21 is a Li-Po 5050 mAh, non-removable battery. Quite sizeable, although still fairly standard for this sort of budget price point. Frankly, we’d be shocked if you didn’t get a couple of full days of use of a single charge of this phone. Speaking of single charges, while you have support for 18W charging here a 10W adapter has been included in the box. If you want to take full advantage of that slightly faster-charging speed you’ll have to provide your brick. But hey, at least it’s USB Type-C 2.0, USB On-The-Go.