The Nokia C21 and C21 Plus offer an Android smartphone experience for under £100

When it returned to the smartphone-making limelight, Nokia’s approach seemed to be to target every market and every price point around.

In recent years, it seems to have become a touch more selective, with a plan to specifically dominate the budget end of the market, and that’s continuing with both the Nokia C21 and C21 Plus – two Android handsets set to come in at under £100 apiece.

The handsets are follow-ups to the Nokia C20, which the company claims is its most successful C-series handset so far. They both use the octa-core SC9863 SoC backed up by a modest 2GB or 3GB of RAM, depending on the version. There are two cameras on the C21: an 8MP rear camera with flash and a front-facing 5MP selfie cam on the front. The Plus model gains a second rear camera and an upgraded main sensor, consisting of a primary 13MP unit with a 2MP depth.

The handsets are both 6.5in devices featuring a V-shaped notch for said selfie camera. While both phones are near enough the same physical size, the two handsets also differ in terms of their battery capacity: 3,000mAh on the regular phone and 4,000mAh on the Plus model. Both batteries, unusually, are user-replaceable, which is a design decision that’s gone out of fashion over the course of the last decade and something we’ve certainly missed.

These are undeniably modest specifications that you’ll feel in day-to-day use, which means Nokia has chosen to use the Go edition of Android 11 – a stripped-back version of Android predominantly aimed at low-cost handsets in emerging markets. Both phones, Nokia says, have minimal preloads to ensure they not only run as smoothly as possible but have a small footprint on the built-in 32GB of internal storage.

They also have a fingerprint reader, a 3.5mm headphone jack and are guaranteed two years of security updates. All three plus points are extremely welcome given the low prices of €99 (around £83) and €119 (roughly £99) respectively.

No doubt there’ll be an element of getting what you pay for here, but Android Go will hopefully make for a passable day-to-day experience. If it does, the Nokia C21 could be the bargain of 2022.

Written by

Alan Martin

Alan Martin is a freelance writer with more than a decade’s worth of experience, mainly in the technology space, with bylines at The Evening Standard, Tom's Guide, The i and many others. His main focus at Expert Reviews is ensuring that your next pick of phone or wearable is the right choice for you and represents the best possible value for money. In the past he’s covered a broad range of games, dental apparel and pet accessories and, on one memorable occasion, had to strip off to retrieve a rogue drone from a lake – such is his dedication to reviews.

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