The Nokia X20 brings 5G phones down to $415

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  The Nokia X20, showing a lovely stock Android home screen. [credit: HMD ]

HMD announced a big pile of smartphones yesterday, the most interesting of which is the Nokia X20, a €349 ($415) device that seems destined for a wide distribution. HMD’s “Nokia X” line represents a new model number scheme for the company, which previously was using decimal numbers like “6.1.” The Nokia X model is being dusted off from when Microsoft first started selling Android phones (not the second time Microsoft started selling Android phones).

The headline feature of the X20 is Qualcomm’s brand-new Snapdragon 480 SoC, which was just announced back in January. The Snapdragon 480 is an 8 nm chip, with two 2 GHz Arm Cortex A76 CPUs and six 1.8 Ghz Cortex A55 CPUs. This is Qualcomm’s first low-end SoC to support 5G, if that does anything for you, and there’s even an option (though Nokia did not exercise it on the X20) for mmWave antennas. More importantly, Qualcomm says the CPU and GPU should be twice as fast as the old Snapdragon 460.

The other big news of the day is that Nokia is extending support to three years now, with three years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates. Previously, the company was doing two years of major updates. It seems like everyone—even lame-duck manufacturers like LG—is extending their Android support lately.