Nokia’s kept Stuff relatively busy this year with the release of the C32 and T10 – both finding some place in our hearts. They beat dealing with load shedding anyway. Now, HMD Global has announced the Nokia G42 5G, a 5G-capable (surprise surprise) smartphone that’s retailing for the low price of R5,000.
There’s nothing particularly interesting about the G42, other than its 5G capabilities and the fact that it’ll be DIY-repairable from the comfort of your own home, as long as you’re willing to foot the import fee and cost of the parts themselves, available from iFixit.
A capable budget-beater from Nokia
So? What does R5,000 get you in 2023? In Nokia’s case, a 6.56in HD+ display coupled with 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM, with the Snapdragon 480+ 5G mobile chipset to round it all off. That’s joined by what seems like a half-decent camera setup, two SIM slots, and a battery that Nokia reckons will net up to three days of juice. Nokia’s avoided any mention of what that battery is, however.
No matter, a quick trip to GSMArena tells us the G42 is probably rocking a 5,000mAh lithium-polymer battery that’ll supposedly retain “80% of its original capacity after 800 full charging cycles.”
Read More: The iPhone 15 Plus starts at R25,000 (don’t worry, it gets worse)
Stuck to the G42’s rear, which incidentally is made up of 65% recycled materials, is a 50MP main sensor, propped up by the usual promises of AI to capture those clear shots. It’s joined by two 2MP depth and macro sensors, with Nokia disregarding the 8MP selfie-cam entirely, which is probably for the best. This is a R5,000 budget-beater, remember?
You’ll be getting Android 13 right out of the box, with at least three years of security updates and two years of general OS updates to look forward to. You don’t really have a choice when it comes to colour, with Nokia opting for a charcoal black this time around, though Nokia’s international site mentions two other colours.
It’s available from today for R5,000 from “selected MTN retailers,” according to HMD Global. Whether that means this one will be network-locked to the yellow network isn’t clear, but we’d be willing to bet that’s the case.
