Nokia Announces X71 With Hole-Punch Display, 48MP Camera

The Nokia brand returned from its Microsoft-imposed exile a few years back under the stewardship of HMD Global, which repurchased the Nokia name from Microsoft after its phone business imploded. The new generation of Nokia handsets run Android and focus mainly on the midrange. Its latest phone is the X71, which bears a striking resemblance to the recently released Samsung Galaxy S10. However, it currently only available in Taiwan.

The X71 follows in the footsteps of the Honor View 20 and Galaxy S10 with its use of a hole-punch display. The small hole near the top of the 6.4-inch screen allows the front-facing camera to peek through. Some people find this design less visually distracting than a notch, but it comes with some of the same tradeoffs. It does at least help make the bezels impressively small (the screen-body ratio is reported at 93 percent). It’s an attractive phone, especially when you consider it will sell for about half the price of a Galaxy S10.

Unlike the Galaxy S10, the Nokia X71 uses an LCD instead of an OLED. That means there’s no in-display fingerprint sensor — both optical and ultrasonic sensors require an OLED. However, Nokia has its customary fingerprint sensor on the back below the camera module. Speaking of the camera, that’s another major selling point for Nokia. The X71 has a 48MP main camera sensor, along with an 8MP wide-angle and 5MP depth sensor.

On the inside, it’s clear this is not a flagship phone. Still, it should hold its own with a Snapdragon 660, 6GB of RAM, a 3,500mAh battery, and 128GB of storage. The X71 sits between devices like the Honor View 20 above and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro below.

Like all of Nokia’s other recent phones, the X71 is an Android One device. That means it has a clean, unencumbered build of Android 9 Pie. There are no unnecessary apps or heavy Android skins to weigh you down. Android One devices also get two years of full update support, which is more than you can expect from most other midrange phones.

There’s no news of the X71 coming to American shores, but Nokia often retools Asian releases for other markets. The phone launches April 30 for TWD 11,900, which works out to about $385.

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