NEW! TCL 10 Pro Full Review & Hands On! Sub-$500 Android Phone Takes The Throne! By Shannon Morse

I first saw these phones at CES in January and knowing how competitive TCL is in the TV market and their history of making phones. I was curious about this launched in North America. What a sub $500 phone give me enough. Quality features to be a flagship killer. I've been testing this one, as well as the TCL 10 L for about a week, so I can give you my hot takes shout out to my buy me a coffee supporter this week, including ECU pirate 95, Brad and gadget chaser, as well as my newest Patreon supporter, including Kimberly. If you are interested in checking out my Patreon or my buy me, a coffee link, I'll put both of those down below also do not forget that subscribing to this channel is the best way to support my content.

So what's up s'mores, my name is Shannon Morse. Welcome to my YouTube channel all about tech reviews and how to be, as well as tutorials, with an emphasis on security and privacy. Do you want to watch my TCL 10l review? Both of these reviews are up now on my YouTube channel, so the link is down below you can watch both of them, and you can compare, so this is the TCL 10 Pro I am running version.2.0 Point 4d point II point H of this operating system. If an update is available before publishing date, I will add any additional information in the description below or as an editor's note. If anything substantial happens with the software or the UI in the few weeks after I post, this I will definitely post another video.

So this is the first TCL branded smartphones for the North American market. This is the TCL 10 series, the 10 pro costs for $49.99, and it comes in amber gray. It's going to release on May 19th via Amazon, with Best, Buy and Walmart to follow in the box you get a 9 volt, 2, amp, quick charge, 3.0 fast charger, a USB, C, cable, SIM tool, CPU case and the phone there is no screen protector. Keep that in mind. If you want to get yourself a screen protector, you have to buy one yourself: the design is sophisticated.

The back is a matte glass with an aluminum frame. This means that it does not pick up a bunch of fingerprints if you use it without a case. The dimensions are six point to four inches 2.85 inches by about 0.3 4 inches, and it weighs six point six ounces. Now that is slightly heavier than the Pixel 3a XL at five point: eight ounces: to give you an idea of the feel the smart key which is found on the left side can be customized to do things like open, Google Assistant, open your camera, take a photo, etc. , etc.

, while the other side has the power button and the volume bar the button placement is really comfortable to use I like the smart, key customization options. TCL does not force any specific setting on you, and it keeps it pretty vanilla, which is great, since I prefer to customize it with the camera in the Google Assistant. The SIM goes in the bottom, and it shares that slot with a micro SD card. If you choose to buy one separately now, there is one speaker grille on the bottom and that's next to the USB port. And yes, you heard me right: when I did my unboxing, there is a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack up top that's great. This is not a water-resistant phone.

So if you have this in the bathroom, don't drop it in the toilet. That would end very badly. It feels really comfortable to hold in hand in either of my hands and I like the thinness of this phone. It's really skinny. Furthermore, it's easy for me to hold it without feeling like it's too big, and even though it has a curved display, thanks to how skinny it is I, don't find myself accidentally touching the sides or corners of the screen very often.

However, it does still happen now. Moving on from that, let's go ahead and talk about that display and the aspect ratio to the display, as you can see, is a six point. Four seven inches AMOLED with 3d glass, it's at twenty, three, forty by 1080, Full, HD plus resolution, and there is a notch in the center for the camera. You do get three hundred and ninety-eight pixels per inch, and it's 600 nits brightness. The display for me was very easy to see in the sunlight here in Colorado, though.

If it's not, there is an option in the settings. It's called sunlight display. That makes it easier to see details in the sunlight. The aspect ratio clocks in at nineteen point five by nine, and it hits 93% for the screen to body ratio. It honestly feels like it could be more than that to the curb display, which really helps to hide the bezels, although they are really, really minimal anyway, especially on the sides, but also on the bottom, as well as the top.

Now, the screen does include an always-on display which can be customized in the settings. I prefer this thing called the sunrise display at least that's what I like to call it, because it keeps most of the screen dark, except for the Rising Sun image, along with a clock, a date and a battery percentage. Whenever you pick it up, the screen does give you a fingerprint on the screen to help you align your finger when unlocking I will talk more about security in a bit, but if you have faced unlock enabled, you do need to press a side key to wake up the display before you can unlock it. There's another cool feature on here called the edge bar on the display, and that can also be customized that lets you quickly access your apps, your contacts, there's even a ruler which, as a new homeowner and somebody who creates stickers for all my different shows, I've, actually found this to be pretty useful. Whenever I want to get quick measurements, and it is accurate now this feels like- and it is a 60 Hertz screen.

Jumping back from 60 Hertz from a 120 Hertz screen is pretty noticeable, and it feels a little jolting I wish they would have included a 120 Hertz or even a 90 Hertz refresh rate in this display. But again that probably would have made the price jump up over 500 bucks. If you are coming from another 60 Hertz display, then this won't bug you. You won't notice it at all unless you've used something that is over 60 Hertz TCL has brought over a lot of their display technology to their phone line, and that includes next vision, as well as bringing over HDR. So next vision is TCL's technology.

That gives you great color accuracy on the screen, and it helps make images pop. This also helps with photography as well. So you get well-adjusted color settings straight out of the box. The 10 series also does real time up conversion from SDR to HDR, so you get bright, highlights nice, deep shadows, beautiful contrast and color on the screen. Now the 10 Pro is HDR 10 Netflix available.

So if you are paying for the 4k Netflix membership, you can also use phone to watch gorgeous HDR content and my I recommend The Witcher, because that show looks so amazing on this phone and the show itself is really great. I mean I totally got into it. There are four rear cameras and a landscape layout on the back with a dual LED flash on each end. These include a 64 megapixel high resolution lens, which is at F 1.79, aperture and point 8 microns pixel size at 79 degrees, field of view, there's also a 2 megapixel super low light lens at F, 1.8 aperture, and that one is 2.9 microns, which is a huge pixel size and 77 degrees field of view. There's a 5 megapixel macro lens at F 2.2 and one point 12 microns that one is 83 degrees, field of view and there's also a 16 megapixel super wide at f/2 point 41.0, microns pixel size that one has a field of view of 123 degrees. You also get 10 times, hybrid digital zoom in the 10 pro now.

The camera app does include some extras and those include pro mode super Knight, which is kind of like nitrite. There's a portrait mode, slo-mo stop motion, light Greece, which is pretty cool panorama, super macro and high pixel, which is up to 64 megapixels. If you switch over to high pixel, you do lose some app functionality like pro mode and HDR. Now you can also control the flash, a timer HDR, the aspect ratio, and you can use filters right inside the camera. Application no need to switch over to Instagram for your filters.

You can even compare three different camera options, there's original ultra ride, and they also have the low-light video setting in there. At the same time now the settings allow you to change the photo size and megapixels the video quality. You can use some 8i features, and you can also change some general options like just removing a TCL watermark, which is very easy to do. Here, are a bunch of photos that I took on the TCL 10 Pro, the main camera using auto, made my photos really vibrant, making greens reds and yellows pop. So much especially like in these pictures right here, the camera drew out greens in the Sailor Jupiter photo.

So I ended up switching over to Pro Mode to correct the color, because her skin it ain't supposed to be green. You all HDR worked well whenever I took photos of my black cat against a very bright background. Whenever she was sitting in the windowsill and zooming worked pretty well, the AI engine did its best to sharpen the image, sometimes too much so, but it still zoomed very, very well. Now. Super macro worked really well as well.

That lens really shines. My photos of my Sailor Moon toys and my flowers were very clear: they weren't grainy they have an artistic touch to them, and I kind of like that, this macro photo of a flower is one of my favorites. Out of all of my testing of these cameras. It was so pretty I had to share it on Twitter, so I did. It was awesome.

The wide lens did give me nice, accurate colors, but sometimes it did have trouble focusing wherever I needed it to focus. So that was a bit of an issue. I had the same experience with portrait mode. If you gave it an obvious focal point, it is crisp it's very detailed without being grainy or losing color accuracy, but whenever I put more than one subject into the photo, it chose one over the other. So the 10 Pro definitely has a narrow focal length.

So touching the screen to choose your subject is very important. Dark mode was outstanding on my cat, as well as my flowers. It took tons of light and only required me to hold it for a second or two to capture enough light. To give me a good photo, these are both taken in a room with dimmers at 10 percent, so I was walking around almost in the dark, and it did a great job with video recording. You do get a couple of different capture options, there's 4k 1080p and 720p at 30fps, and they do have electronic image stabilization built-in.

You can also do slow motion, video capture at 1080p at 120, fps or 720p at 240, FPS or 960 fps. That's pretty crazy! So here's a test video that I did to try out the EIS and the audio from the microphone I am recording at 4k on the TCL 10 Pro, to see how the Audio sounds as well as the electronic image stabilization hi. How are you doing? You did now the front camera is 24 megapixels with an aperture of f28. Oh, the pixel size is 0.9, and it has a 79 point, seven degrees field of view. You can also get videos at 1080p 720p at 30fps, and that does include an is as well now you can use the same filters on the front-facing camera and also apply beauty mode or portraits for a nice both, but there is no pro or super night.

So with no beauty mode applied, selfies were kind of hit or miss on a cloudy day outside where I'm getting a natural soft box. It did very well. Sometimes, though, I felt like my face was out of focus or too soft still, even though I didn't have beauty mode turned on. Lastly, this video used the front camera so go ahead and take a look at this, and let me know what you think this is 1080p 30 on the TCL 10 Pro, to see how it sounds as well as the image stabilization I'm indoors again, and you can definitely see it blown out behind me, but it looks like it's trained to correct it. A little better.

So will I be vlogging on this most likely, not unless I used an external audio microphone. Now, let's move on to the chipset, that's a Qualcomm snapdragon 675! That is a step-down from the 865 that I have been using lately in a phone. That's $500 more than this. The speed and the type of CPU include a Qualcomm cry, 460 outscore processor and in Arena 612 GPU, and that includes 6 gigs of RAM. Now I use 3d marks slingshot extreme.

To give me a good idea of the power available in this device. My overall score averaged around 10 26, and it definitely stuttered during the heavy load so for serious mobile gaming, maybe not the best option, but I did test out some games anyway. To give you a nice feel of the processor and the power so playing something like Monument, Valley or real, miss looks beautiful and a smooth on this display same thing with Mario Kart, no issues there, but I did get a little of stutter during some tasks in Pok?mon Go as far as storage goes. You do get 128 gigs of ROM micros up to 256 gigs, so you can increase the ROM there and the TCL UI runs on android 10. Now Google is announcing Android 11 pretty soon, and the 10 pro will be updated to Android 11 as well.

Now it comes with all the Android 10 goodness. So you get gestures, you get dark mode, and my goodness this is one of the closest things. I have seen to a clean, vanilla, Android experiences as a phone can get prompts ? TCL for not trying to I. Don't know recreate a good thing that we already have. So thank you TCL for not changing up the UI too much.

There is practically no bloatware on here other than your basics, so you have a music app there's a radio app which is pretty cool. They can't include that since they have a headphone adapter, there's Facebook, which I'm going to uninstall right after this review, there's also an IR remote, which is great, especially if you're at a bar, and you want to mess with people, not that I do that. But it's fun just saying: Google apps are pre-installed as well as Netflix ?, so you get tons of options there. You don't have to install them separately and there are a few fun features included like that edge bar there's, a pre-installed screen recorder, which is so useful. If you are a YouTube reviewer, there's a smart manager in the settings which basically calculates your phone's memory.

Your battery notifications and auto start enabled apps to see if there are any apps, that you should close or if you should enable your battery saving mode, etc. , etc. There's a reading mode there's an eye comfort mode, which is also great for nighttime and lowering blue light emission. Now, who would I be if I did not include some security information? In one of my reviews, I mean this is my channel right. So, first off we have faced unlock.

There is a facial recognition. It's quick! It does not recognize me if my eyes are closed, which thank God, it doesn't glass or no glasses works either way. Furthermore, it does not work with a face mask and that's whether you're wearing like a beauty, Korean mask or a n99 mask. So keep that in mind fingerprint on display is another option that you have I already mentioned that it glows. Whenever you pick up your phone showing you where to put your finger, it is recognizing your fingerprint, but the login is ever slow slightly delayed after registering so opening the actual login screen takes a little longer than what I'm used to there is a really cool feature with the fingerprint -.

It's called the fingerprint quick launch menu and that lets you quickly launch into applications or set up actions without raising your finger off of the sensor. I thought that was pretty neat, and it's something that I've used quite a few times since I started messing with this phone. Now the 10 series phones do have a private Locker in the smart manager, where you can also store files in a private space that can be locked with a separate pin or pattern, also very cool. As far as connectivity goes, the 10 Pro includes 4G Wi-Fi up to AC 4 5 gigahertz, there's also 2.4 gigahertz, obviously GPS a hot spot. There's tethering, there's NFC, there's also Bluetooth 5.0, now call quality was very clear: I didn't have any drops or hiccups, or anything like that. I'm on Google Phi, that is determined by your hardware, your phone carrier and the reception in your area.

So where I'm at in Denver I had no issues now with Bluetooth 5.0, you do get codecs, including APDEX and APDEX HD. There's l, DEC, AAC and TWS I'm, pretty happy that they included L DAC as well as apt, X HD, because both of those have better transfer rates, so they obviously sound better. The 10 Pro also supports up to 4 devices at once, because it does have Bluetooth 5.0, which means super Bluetooth. That's pretty cool too. There is only one speaker which I would prefer if there were two front-facing ones, especially because I sometimes cover this one up with my finger whenever I'm holding it.

This speaker does sound a bit Hollow, it's really missing bass, it's practically non-existent really, but that's usually a thing with phone speakers. So it's not a major concern, though vocals are clear, and it does get very, very loud. It would have a richer sound if it had two speakers, though, and that's usually the case, and then they have that 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, which I love I still have my older Bose QC is, so I can totally use those with this phone and still charge it at the same time, which is awesome. So it's great because I never turn on Bluetooth whenever I go to hacker cons, because people like to hack Bluetooth, so I just prefer to leave Bluetooth off, and I mentioned that I can charge it at the same time, because there is no wireless charging in this phone. There is a whopping forty-five hundred mill ampere hour battery on here with quick charge.3.0 and you can do OTG reverse charging at 5, volts, 5.1 amps to fully charge it. It takes about 2 hours.

You can hit 50 percent in about 30 minutes now in my testing, I would hit 53 percent in 30 minutes and then about 99 percent in two hours. My battery lasted me all day on a full charge. I got it down to about 40 percent after using it for YouTube for gaming, for photography pretty much everything I talked about in this review in normal day-to-day social media usage. So my overall impressions are that it's a quality phone for under $500 I came away from this review, feeling very impressed by the many aspects of this phone, including the battery life. The overall design I mean it's a very beautiful phone and especially the display on this thing.

I was able to get some excellent photos out of it whenever I had good light sources. Although I was not a big fan of the front-facing camera I loved using this for light gaming for entertainment, because that HDR content really shines on this display. I mean like I'm gonna, watch more Witcher after this review, because it looks so pretty on this phone so for four hundred and fifty dollars would you buy it I think I. Would this be a perfect option at that price? Point I would love to know what you think, as well so post your comments down below and subscribe. If you want more thorough reviews like this one- and please share this video, if you found it valuable, that really helps me build this channel in this community.

Thank you. So much to my s'mores for watching I'm, Shannon Morse, don't forget to watch the TCL 10l review as well. It's coming up at the same time and I will see you next time. Talk to you later bye. You.

Source : Shannon Morse