Nokia G21: The Best Budget-Friendly Smartphone for Everyday Use

Nokia G21 Review : It is a budget friendly smartphone from HMD Global. It claims three days of battery life and promises to come with Android updates for the next two years.

The phone also has a high refresh rate display which is now becoming common in phones priced under 15 thousand.

There is tough competition from Redmi, Realme and Samsung in this segment and companies are competing to outdo each other by offering something better.

The phone stands out in the market on the behalf of Android One and battery capacity. So would you like to buy Nokia G21 when buying a low budget phone? Here is my review.

Nokia G21 Price in India

The base variant of Nokia G21 starts at the Rs 12,999 with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. It’s second variant comes in 6GB RAM and 128 GB storage which priced at Rs 14,999. The company has introduced it in two finishes – Nordic Blue and Dusk.

Nokia G21 Design

Most of the smartphones in the budget segment try to comes with an glossy finish, where the Nokia G21 looks a bit outdated here and it had a textured back panel which is made of plastic like the rest of the phones.

But it prevents fingerprints and company provides a case in the box with the phone. The back panel has a square camera module on top left corner which doesn’t look too prominent.

Nokia G21 Performance and Battery Life

The Nokia G21 performs well for its price. It can handle casual games and apps without any lag. However, heavy games and apps tooks more time to load.

The 6GB RAM variant allows for some multitasking, but it doesn’t get the RAM extension feature that could have come in handy in the 4GB variant.

The side-mounted fingerprint scanner is fast to unlock the phone and quality of HD Plus display is average. Full HD Plus displays are now coming in that segment, so some people may disappointed.

The benchmark score of the phone will gives you an indication of the usage experience. The phone scored 198,068 points on AnTuTu. It scored 306 and 1221 points in Geekbench 5’s single and multi-core tests respectively.

It scored 34fps and 8.8fps in GFX Bench’s T-Rex and Car Chase tests. These scores were on par with budget smartphones like the Redmi 10 Prime and Samsung Galaxy F22, which fall in the same price range.

Nokia G21 cameras

The Nokia G21 provides a triple rear camera setup. It has an 50 megapixel primary camera, 2 megapixel macro camera and 2 megapixel depth camera. It had a 8 megapixel shooter for selfie.

The camera app is pretty basic and there are some different shooting modes to choose from. The 50 megapixel primary camera clicks photos in 12.5 megapixels by default.

The primary camera takes good photos in daylight which looks good on the phone’s display. Details get reduced when you zoom in. In landscape mode, the photo had a water colour like effect. In case of high brightness, it quickly enable the HDR mode, which improves the dynamic range.