The Budget Phone That’s a Pleasure to Use

Budget smartphones that are actually good can be hard to come by. With so many corners to be cut compared to the industry-leading premium phones, they can leave much to be desired.

When it came to testing the sleek NUU B20 5G, I was blown away by how frictionless it was to use, and how close it comes to the premium experience of phones that are well above its price range.

Setting Up The NUU B20 5G

Opening the box you’re greeted with the NUU B20 5G itself, a USB-C to USB-A charger, along with a USB-A charging brick. It also comes with a handy SIM tray ejector tool, stickers, tempered glass screen protector, and quick start guide.

Setting up the device is as expected, it ships with a decent charge and gives you the ability to copy your files from another device and sync your accounts. Once that process is over the B20 5G is ready to go!

NUU B20 5G Design

The design is my favorite aspect of this phone. It’s clean, slim, minimalist, and overall a pleasure to use.

The device measures 161 x 75.1 x 9.9mm, and features a mostly plastic body. It doesn’t feel as solid as a glass or metal phone, and the back feels a bit thin and flexible. But it keeps the price low, the weight light, and makes the phone less susceptible to cracks or shatters.

The rear cameras don’t jut out too far from the body, and the top and bottom of the device have these long oval dimples.

Not only is this an appealing design choice, but it also provides the user with a convenient and comfortable place to rest the phone on your fingers, both in portrait and landscape mode.

Along the right side of the phone, there are the usual volume controls and a fingerprint scanner/power button combo.

Having the fingerprint reader built into the power button makes unlocking the phone a breeze.

On the left side of the phone, you’ll find the SIM card tray, which features dual SIM card functionality, along with a microSD card slot for expandable storage up to 512GB.

At the bottom of the device is the USB-C port, with fast charging support, a single speaker, and—get this—a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Having a 3.5mm headphone jack on a smartphone these days is a rare occurrence, but is definitely a welcome addition. This unlocks a lot of possibilities when using the phone, such as being able to use wired headphones while charging the device at the same time, while also giving greater versatility when using headphones, speakers, or in any situation where Bluetooth isn’t an option or just less convenient.

NUU B20 5G Display

At the front of the phone, we have a beautiful full-screen display, with minimal bezels, and a central cut-out for the selfie camera.

The placement of the 8MP camera cut-out is ideal, as it doesn’t interfere with any of the status bar information on the left and right of the screen, while also keeping your photos centered.

You’ll find a 6.5-inch, FHD+ 2400 x 1080 screen with a buttery smooth 90Hz refresh rate. Refresh rates are where a lot of budget phones tend to make compromises, so it’s great to see such smooth motion and animations on a wallet-friendly device.

Having this all-screen aesthetic creates a really immersive experience when streaming movies, playing games, or just interfacing with the phone in general.

The device phone comes packed with some great internal specs, too. It comes with a MediaTek Dimensity 700 Octa-Core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of internal storage, with 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.1, GPS, and NFC. Once again, this is an impressive lineup for a budget phone where many other brands would try to cut corners in these areas.

Imaging

On the backside of the phone, we have a triple camera setup along with an LED flash. The main camera is 48MP, paired with a 16MP wide-angle lens, and a 2MP macro camera.

Performance from the main camera was great when shooting near subjects outdoors, creating a nice natural bokeh.

Details were sharp, and color reproduction was accurate. Indoors I found reasonably good results, but in poor lighting, the images just come out a little softer and grainier.

The wide-angle lens had a similar performance to the main shooter, which was a pleasant surprise and always a useful feature to have on a smartphone.

The macro lens was a blast to use, and it’s not a very common feature on smartphones let alone budget phones. I had a lot of fun finding small objects to get really close to, and I think the images look great and provide a fascinating perspective.

The 8MP front camera was a really solid performer and had no real gripes when taking the occasional selfie with this phone.

The camera app also has options to enable two specialty software modes. The first being a classic portrait mode, but in my testing, I found that this mode doesn’t really depth map your image, but instead just adds a blurry vignette around the edges of the frame. There’s also a beauty mode, meant to smooth your subject’s skin and slim their facial features, but this looked a little unnatural, so I’ll likely just stick to the standard modes of shooting.

You also find 1080p video recording up to 60fps, in both the main camera, wide camera, and the selfie camera, the quality and color of which is comparable to the photos the B20 produces.

Overall the camera functionality gives you some really great options for shooting with the diverse array of lenses on the front and back of the phone. I wouldn’t say it’s a flagship level of image production, but it will definitely get the job done for most situations you’ll find yourself in.

Battery

The B20 5G is packed with a 5,000 mAh battery, which is above average, beating out even a new iPhone 14 Pro Max battery at only 4,323 mAh. The battery performance is stellar and even after heavy usage, this phone was easily able to last well over a full day for me. I usually ended a full day of use with about 35-40% battery left.

Performance

The NUU B20 5G has been a pleasure to use. With stacked internals, a 90Hz all-screen display, and a powerful battery, I’ve yet to experience anything other than a smooth experience. The phone runs on Android 12, the latest version of Android that’s widely available outside of Google’s own Pixel lineup.

There’s no bloatware or wild skins that bog down the OS or mess up the interface.

The software experience sticks really close to stock Android which makes for a super clean and efficient experience, that you can easily build on top of with launchers and skins if you so please. The 8GB of RAM makes multitasking a breeze, and I have yet to come across any hiccups that keep me from using the phone in a manner that works for me. The 128GB storage has been plenty for me to download all my favorite apps, my music and photo library, and even download some shows and movies for a trip. Plus, having the opportunity to expand that by 512GB makes it really tough to overfill my storage.

Upgrading From the NUU B15?

Compared to the NUU B15, the B20 5G has a couple of notable new features, including an updated design, and a new processor, running the newer Android 12. Connectivity is given a speed bump from 4G LTE to 5G, while the memory is also updated from 4GB to 8GB. The B20 5G does have a slightly smaller screen than the B15, and also loses the fourth camera lens that was dedicated to bokeh in portrait mode.

Drawbacks

So with all this praise, where are the weak points in the NUU B20 5G? It’s hard to ask for more out of a budget phone that already packs so many good specs, but if I had to pick the biggest drawback it would likely be the cameras. Each camera gets the job done, but as mentioned before you’re not going to be getting top-of-the-line performance at this price point.

Some other features that would have been nice to have in the B20 5G would be an OLED screen to blend seamlessly into the phone’s bezels, wireless charging capabilities, and an additional speaker for stereo sound. While I think these features would be fantastic additions to the NUU B20 5G, they are far from necessary, and I’d gladly sacrifice them for a sleek phone such as this, that performs this well at such a great price.

So, Is the NUU B20 5G Right for You?

With a sleek and slim design, over a full day of battery life, a buttery smooth screen, great performance, and a stock Android experience, it’s incredibly hard to beat in the budget phone arena. The ultrafast 5G speeds unlock a premium user experience, when most other phones in this range don’t even offer 5G antenna options. I can see this phone stacking up against flagship devices over four times its price point. It’s not going to have all the super premium features of those more expensive phones, but the user experience is a delight (plus, there’s a headphone jack!)