Nokia G42 review: repairable budget phone makes a mid-range case

Drop your phone, smash the screen, and you’ll likely turn the air as purple as the back of the Nokia G42 5G (though pink and grey will also be available). With this phone, however, you’re not forced to buy a new one, as the Finnish phone pioneer has partnered with iFixIt to not only make a phone that can have its screen, battery and charging port swapped out, but also to ship you a toolkit so you can do it yourself.

The advent of right-to-repair legislation will make this style of phone more common, and the G42 is Nokia’s second handset you can take apart and fiddle with, after the lower-spec G22.

It helps that it’s not a bad phone either, with 5G and decent amounts of RAM and storage, along with an eight-core chipset, for only £200 (US availability isn’t confirmed at the time of writing), which makes it a potential contender among the best budget camera phones. Though with only two years of OS updates and three of security patches, we question whether the phone will last long enough before being replaced to benefit from its repairability.

Nokia G42 review: Key specs

Design and screen

The plastic back of the G42 we’re sent for review is a rich and glossy purple. It’s really a lovely colour, and if you remember the iPhone advert in which a sharply tailored gent with a glint in his eye slips a handset somewhere in the neighbourhood of Pantone Lavendula into the top pocket of his suit jacket, then you’ve got a good idea of the G42’s resplendent plumage, though the colour here is deeper and has a sheen that catches the light.

We don’t spend much time staring at the back of our phones, and tend to cover them in protective cases anyway, but that seems a shame here - perhaps it’s to encourage users to take advantage of the repair capabilities by indulging in reckless, case-free phone use.

From the front it’s nothing out of the ordinary, the bezel thin and the front camera descending like a drip into the screen, which is made of Gorilla Glass 3. At the side are the usual power switch, which doubles as a fingerprint reader, and volume rocker, while at the base you’ll find the USB Type-C port, a single speaker, and a headphone socket.

The 6.5in screen with a 20:9 aspect ratio results in a phone that’s about the right size for the specially trained test hands we use for reviewing phones, which are a little larger than average. It’s a little low-res compared to other phones on the market, though for the niche it inhabits this is par for the course. The 90Hz refresh rate means things scroll nice and smoothly too. Once you’ve got a video streaming on it at a sensible viewing distance there's little to complain about, though it’s not a phone you’re going to be able to easily read in direct sunlight.

And speaking of light, the G42 comes in at about the same weight as a Google Pixel 7a, a full 26g less than the Honor Magic 5 Pro.

Cameras

The 50MP sensors shipping with modern phones sound good, but you get a 12.5MP file after all the processing that goes on, which is still a decent size. A 50MP mode is available that will provide more detail, if you need it, but requires really good light. There's no ultrawide or telephoto option on the G42 beyond a 2x crop, which sees image and particularly video quality suffer, but you do get a 2MP macro camera for peering at things up close.

The camera bulge on the G42 is the same ‘50MP AI camera’ cluster that we’ve seen on Nokia phones since 2022’s G21. It produces nicely warm images, and the main camera is generally fine, though nothing special. It’s best in good light, where there's a nice amount of detail and colour to be found in its snaps. Darken things down a bit and you start to get smearing.

Luckily, the good level of performance you’ll get from the phone means the camera app runs without slowing down, something that can happen with cheaper phones.

Performance

There's a six-core cluster at the heart of the Snapdragon 480+ in the Nokia G42. You get a pair of performance cores - Cortex A76 at 2.2GHz - and four A55 cores running at 1.8GHz for background tasks. It has 6GB of RAM and an Adreno 619 GPU but is over two years old at the time of writing, and this is borne out in our benchmark tests.

They’re actually very decent, putting the phone in the same ballpark as various Samsung Galaxy A-series phones, OnePlus Nords and a whole lot of Redmi and Realme handsets. The thing they all have in common is that they’re budget models, but the Nokia does beat the Google Pixel 5 from 2020, a phone that originally cost three times the amount you’ll shell out for the G42.

It’s certainly a responsive phone. We were never left waiting for an egregiously long time for an app to open. Battery life is a harder thing to quantify, however, as the standard test we use to compare phones wouldn’t run. The longest we managed to keep it going for was about six hours, which took it down to around 50%. Nokia claims three days of use from a charge, and as long as your usage is light and you make careful use of the battery-saver mode that turns off things like 5G and location services, then that’s not out of the question.

Whatever the actual battery life is, we’d expect to see it somewhere near the top of the charts, and there's 20W fast charging too to quickly juice it up.

Should something dreadful happen to your phone, such as a smashed screen, ruptured charging port, or a battery that won’t hold its charge any more, you can open the phone up and effect repairs yourself. Ours came with an iFixit-branded toolkit that contains a spudger and plectrum-like piece of plastic for opening the casing, along with tweezers, a screwdriver handle with interchangeable heads that include the usual straight and cross heads, plus more interesting Torx drivers. You can’t open the phone up with your fingernails, it’s too tightly put together, so there's little chance of it coming apart in your pocket.

Replacement parts and service guides are available from iFixit, and the most expensive is a new battery at £23 - considerably cheaper than replacing the whole phone. It’s not a completely simple thing to switch out the components, as once you’ve got the case off there are a lot of small screws to undo and cables to unhitch before you can start lifting out components and replacing them, but if you’re confident about fiddling with the interiors of PCs there's nothing too difficult there.

Price

For £200, the G42 is undercutting a lot of the market, even the budget sector. This price point puts it up against phones like the Moto G62 5G or Redmi Note 11. It’s the bottom of the mid-range: go any lower and you’re deep in budget territory, where the phones may work but won’t give a pleasing experience.

In some ways, Nokia has it just about right with the G42, its porridge neither too hot nor too cool. The performance and battery life are perfectly decent, and the novelty of having a repairable phone will draw customers in. A bundle with a pair of Nokia earbuds is available if you buy direct from the Nokia site at the time of writing, which increases the value proposition here considerably.

Should I buy the Nokia G42?

The G42 5G is an attractive phone, with enough power to cater to your communication needs and enough storage to fill with photos and videos before you even think of troubling the SD slot. The purple casing looks good, it’s very competitively priced, and while it may not appeal to gamers or those hoping to run machine learning models at high speed on a portable device, there's plenty here for most people.

The major drawback is the lack of NFC, as Google Pay has become a major way to deal with purchases, especially for forgetful types who tend to leave their wallets at home. The OS and security updates could go on for longer too. But apart from the inconvenience of needing to take your credit card with you when you leave the house, this is a versatile phone that offers the added bonus of a quick DIY fix if you smash the screen.