Nokia XR20 5G Android 11 Unlocked Rugged Smartphone Dual SIM US Version 6/128GB 6.67-Inch Screen 48MP Dual Camera Polar Night/Blue

Purchased April 2022. Battery started to fail mid 2023. Overheated in areas with intermittent signal. Now will only charge when both plugged in and on top of wireless charging. Battery discharges fast, about 1% every 10 minutes. Otherwise phone was good for a year or so worked on T-Mobile and EE/BT. Now I am shopping for a replacement.

This phone is Total Garbage! If I could give it a -5 stars I would! Rugged? LMAO! It’s rugged as a marshmallow it did not make it 9 months before it died. This phone has android 12 comparability problems, finger print quit working, eats energy had to buy a additional 10,000 mah battery to make it through a 12 hour day at work barely useing it! Just shuts down and does nothing. Then 3 to 5 days later it just turns itself on may work 2 weeks a month always at the worst time it just poof off for days! Now rear back light is out nothing but problems every day Horrable! I wish I could still get a refund cause everything advertised is a total lie!

Unlike its rugged competitors from ulephone and blackview the nokia xr20 has a very refined design with no weird bulgy bits that are common on rugged phones. This non bulky design makes it very easy to hold. The fingerprint reader is fast and responsive and it will hopefully not fail and burn me after two years of use like my ulephone did.

The camera while shooting normal jpegs is….unimpressive with very oversharpened and grainy photos. However, switching over to pro mode to shoot RAW was a pleasant suprise with clean crisp images that really show off that nice 48mp sensor. Note that the images were taken in broad daylight with 100ISO. When editing these in lightroom and pushing exposures around I was impressed with how much detail they retained in the darks and highlights.

Battery life is good for a few days of light use (checking emails, reading news, books, taking photos,etc) or one day with the light use and a few hours of games or streaming.

Sound: It has a headphone jack, need i say more? Speakers are very loud and you can make sense of what the noise is even at maximum volume.

Screen: As an avid kinda reader, Im a big fan of the extra dim function for reading in dark or poorly lit places like airplanes, etc.

Pros: A good phone, rugged, heavy, secure an happy with overall performance.
Cons: Cannot find answers to simple questions (on Net, Youtube or manuals)…
1. How does one disable/enable the second SIM? It will help with the battery usage I am sure. my other phone(s) allow me enable/disable SIM under sim-management, but no choice here.
2. How does one close running apps? Android normally had 3 soft-buttons at the bottom. One of them would show all the apps running and you could close them by swiping. This phone only shows 1 soft-button-line at the bottom, and it switches back to menu, but the apps running keep running in the back. I finally found out the solution. If you touch the soft bar at the bottom and slowly move it up an inch you can get the running apps and close them
3. You touch the switch-off button and it either starts the camera, or calls 911. I have dialed it twice already. Not sure why it cant just turn it off and on…
I am keeping it a few days all will get used to it maybe. but if not, I will have to return it.

I was excited to find a “tough” 5G phone with SD card slot and headphone jack. Although the phone will recognize a T-Mobile SIM card and “might” work on the T-Mobile network, if you are a former Sprint customer, then you are SOL and they will refuse to activate the phone based on the IMEI. I visited 3 T-Mobile stores (2 corporate and 1 independent) and spent probably 7 hours on the phone trying to activate this phone on my former Sprint account with no success. No one could tell me why it won’t work or isn’t supported on their network. I got the feeling everyone I talked to didn’t care and only wanted to sell me something they stock and switch my plan so they could earn a commission. The most likely reason (and I take this with a block of salt) given by their tech support is that due to the recent transition/merger of the Sprint and T-Mobile networks, there may be frequency bands that are no longer active but were supported when the phone was initially released only a year ago. I really wanted to love this phone but I could never really try it out and it seems to be a losing battle to get thru to anyone at T-Mobile who is willing to dig in to the issue for a resolution.