Rumor | A Nokia G20 successor is on the way with a significant re-design and a potential SoC downgrade

According to the latest leaks, the HMD Global comapny Nokia has a replacement for 2021's G20 in the works. However, fans of the brand might only be so happy with the prospect of this rumored upgrade...mainly because it may not be much of one in certain ways.

For a start, renders dug up and freshly posted to Twitter by Roland Quandt indicate that Nokia has ditched the by-now classic ring-shaped camera hump from the G20 in its putative successor. The new design leaves the "G21" with 3 rear cameras and looking much more like a Motorola competitor, in truth.

The new renders might also reveal that the upcoming phone (also known as the TA-1401, according to Quandt) will have a waterdrop-notched display (no surprises there, then) and a power button that might double as a fingerprint reader. However, another leak suggests that Nokia intends to make bigger changes with its processor.

Where the G20 has a MediaTek Helio G35 SoC, a new Geekbench listing asserts its next generation will launch with one from Unisoc instead. Not only is the T606 an older platform, its clock across all cores (1.6GHz) is slower than the majority of the Helio-line silicon's clusters.

The G35 also has a PowerVR GE8320 GPU that faster than the ARM Mali-G57 MP1 found in the T606 (albeit not by much). Then again, the latter has a greater variety of Cortex-A75 and A55 cores. Nevertheless, it has only barely cracked 300 in terms of single-core Geekbench 5 scores in the putative G21.

This leak also suggests that the phone may come with only 4GB of RAM and stuck on Android 11 - although this might change on the phone's release, at least. Interestingly, it also purports to show that it has the code-name of ShadowcatPlus, thereby possibly hinting at the possible existence of a Shadowcat out there - the G11, perhaps?

Then again, these new alleged G21 details may be a long way from validation from Nokia as yet. Meanwhile, the G20 remains at a largely unchanged ~US$200 on Amazon at the moment.