TCL 10 Pro Long Term Review By Mitesh Shah

What's going on everyone, I'm a test chair, and you know what smartphones are hard to make. I mean even giants in the mobile space, like Google have had a hard time breaking into the market with their pixel phones. So it was astounding to hear TCL who's, much better known for making TVs announcing three new smartphones at the beginning of this year, but they did it, and they're attacking the smartphone market. The same way they did the TV market, but trying to provide a great value smartphone instead of going all out and giving you something that can compete with the iPhones and galaxy s20s of the world, because, let's face it, that's really hard to do, and today I have for you guys my full review of their flagship phone, the 10 pro, which comes in at just 450. So the real question is: did they defy the odds and create a great smartphone on the first? Try? Let's talk about it all right, so there are five main topics I want to cover in this review. I want to talk about the displays, the camera performance, software and battery life together.

I think these five components can make a fantastic smartphone, but, more importantly, for budget phones like this one. It can show you the trade-offs that you're making to hit that price point and can really help you narrow down who this phone is for. So, let's start off by talking about the display, and at this price point you generally expect to get an okay LCD panel with lackluster colors that is barely bright enough to see outside. But that's not the case here since TCL is a TV manufacturer, they have a lot of experience, making great screens and the 10 pro comes with a 6.4 inch, 1080p AMOLED display that supports hdr10. So it's got great colors and great brightness, so yeah it's pretty good screen.

But of course it's not perfect. It's only a 60hz display. It's got an u-shaped notch, which I know personally, I don't have a problem with, but some of you out there will and out of the box. I really do feel like the colors are a little over saturated, but it's all minor problems. The biggest problem this display has is the curved edges.

This is my first smartphone with curved edges and I frankly hate them. I've never had so many accidental touches when I'm trying to use a phone, and I thought I would get used to it over time. I thought you know it's a couple of days with it would I would get used to it, but I have not. Furthermore, I've had it for a month, and I've not gone a single day without having an accidental, miss touch with this display. So definitely curved displays, I think, is just a downside of this display.

The curve display also causes like the colors to shift off axis, and you get some weird light reflections on the edges, if you're looking at it and there's a light to your left or right. So it's really annoying, and you know in 2020 we see a lot of companies moving away from curve displays, like Samsung they've started, making the curves a little less sharp. So it's a little sad to see TCL deciding to go the route of having these large curves on their display when everybody else is going away from it. Now for the calibration of the display, the phone does come with an app from TCL to two of the displays color and white balance. It also helps you do things that convert SDR content to HDR and has a reading mode built in.

I didn't particularly find the HDR conversion to be that great. It did tend, from my opinion, just tend to make skin tones look a lot worse and most of the stuff that I watch. So I kept it off. But if you guys want to see what your videos like in HDR, you can do that uh. It's also got the raw reading mode, which I actually found to be pretty useful.

So what it does is it reduces all the blue light. That's coming out of your display, or at least does a good job removing most of it, and that helps you be able to focus on your display for longer. So if you're, someone who likes to read books on your phone, this is absolutely great. If you're someone who spends most of your time on social media looking at pictures and stuff, I would definitely not use this mode for that at all. Now before we move on from the display.

The one other thing that I want to mention here were speakers on this phone, or rather the singular speaker on the bottom of this phone. Look it's 20 20. ! This is not a sub 300 phones. It shouldn't have a single speaker like seriously. The viewing experience from this great screen is marred by having a single downward firing.

Speaker, that's really easy to cover up, and it does get decently loud, but it still sounds hollow and tinny at high volume. So I don't think it has a bad choice, but they did on the prop side, give you a headphone jack, something that you really don't see in smartphones anymore. So that's kind of cool. I mean I personally, don't used it that much, but it's cool that it's there all right. But let's move on from this place.

Talking about the cameras on this phone now, I did a full review of the cameras already, so you guys can check that out up in the cards up here or in the description below, but let me sum it up for you here. So first, there are a lot of cameras on this phone. There are four of them on the back and one on the front. The front one in my opinion is the worst one it lacks HDR unless you're in great light. It doesn't look good at all.

It's also a lot narrower than most other smartphone cameras, so you are going to have a hard time fitting a lot of people in the camera unless you can really stretch your arm far out or if you have a selfie stick now. As for the cameras on the back, the main camera sensor is a 64 megapixel sensor that takes 60 megapixel bend, photos that look actually perfect in good lighting they're, not what I would call realistic. They tend to be overly bright and have really punchy colors. I think a lot of people really like this, but they don't tend to be very realistic in poor lighting, though the photos do tend to be very soft, with the aggressive noise reduction. So that's not great.

That's the same situation for the ultrawide camera, which is really nice to have, but it's the same thing in good lighting. It can be really great, especially for outdoor shots for indoor shots. I found that generally, there wasn't enough light to make it look good, and also it's a really hard time focusing on objects that are close by so, if you're trying to take a really wide shot of something, that's in front of you, you're going to have a hard time getting in focus unless it's pretty far away from you. So that's why I found a little sad now. The other two cameras on the phone.

I found a little less useful, there's a macro camera on here, which is actually pretty cool. It's definitely one of the best macro cameras. I've used so far, but I just don't see myself using it that much and then there's a two megapixel ultra low-light video camera, which that's just not worth mentioning so overall for the camera. I would say the cameras are pretty good for the price point unless you're, comparing it to something like the Pixel 3a, but then you're limited to just having a single camera, though it is, admittedly a much better camera than what's on this phone all right. Next up, let's talk about one of the most important things to get right with a budget phone, and that is performance.

These days performance is a given on high-end flagship phones. There might be some small difference between how fast one phone launches an app versus another like you can compare the iPhone the Galaxy Note 20 whatever, but honestly it doesn't matter because most people will never notice the defense it's not going to affect their everyday lives, but with budget phones. You never know what you're going to get if you're going to get reasonable experience or something that's just awful. So in terms of specs. Here we have the snapdragon 675, along with six gigabytes of ram, and I have to say performance on this phone has just been amazing, like I really did not expect a budget phone to perform this well, and it's really performed.

Well, I'm not saying that there aren't any slowdowns. There are definitely slowdowns in places, but it's been perfect. Now, I'm not saying it's going to keep up with flagship phones in terms of like app launches or fluid UI, but other than a few weak spots that I found. While I was testing this phone, I really haven't found myself frustrated at all. While using this phone, the phone can even handle split screen.

Multitasking really well like it's, not the smoothest one opening up a second app, but it works, and you can just use both the apps really well, something that the iPhone currently can't do and the six gigabytes of ram definitely help. This is, I think, fantastic to see on a budget phone. I think this guy's ram should be mandatory now on the android phones and there's one place that I find the performance to be a little annoying, and that was with the fingerprint reader. Initially I thought this was just an end display fingerprint reader. I thought you know those are just generally slower than the more traditional capacitive ones, but after testing it a while.

I realized that I could take my finger off the lock, and it would still unlock after half a second. So the thing the phone had registered, my fingerprint it was already unlocking it just took a little longer to unlock than I thought was necessary. So yeah, that's been one of those few places that I noticed that's a little slower and since it's the only way to unlock your phone without, you know actually putting in a passcode or something it's a little annoying but yeah. Overall, I really think that the average person will not notice that this phone is running a slower processor than the galaxy notes of the world or whatever, like that, so yeah performance wise. This phone is surprisingly good.

Now performance has helped quite a bit by the software which, for our first attempt by TCL, is really great. The phone has android 10, of course, and the skin on top is very close to stock android. Honestly, it's very much like a Samsung skin, and it's a good thing. Honestly. Samsung have been making pretty good skins nowadays, and it's been perfect.

There are a couple extra apps thrown in their like next vision to control your tuning of your smart display, a smart key app which lets you control the little button on the left hand, side which, by the way, way better than having a Bixby button, because you can customize it completely, and it's also got an IR remote app for the IR blaster on it's on top of the device and there's a few other specific apps. But I wouldn't call anything in bloatware like there is Facebook and Netflix installed in the phone by default. But honestly, I think most people will be pretty happy with that and yeah they've also added a couple. Useful functions like a built-in screen recorder and then scrolling screenshots and things like that. But then they've also made some weird decisions, like the volume pop-up covering the entire YouTube page when watching YouTube videos in portrait like its super annoying, and you can't dismiss it either.

So when you turn up the volume while you're watching a video you just it just takes up the entire space for like a good three four seconds, and it's really annoying, and then the other thing is a smart key right. I really like the fact that they have the smart key, but I don't love the location of it. It's the exact opposite side of the power button, so I found myself hitting it a little too much, so I pretty much disabled the single tap, but you still have the double tap and the long press, and I use it to turn on my flashlight all the time. It's really great. Also, the lock screen by default doesn't show you actual notifications.

I found that really annoying like it won't actually show you notifications just show you a little symbol for it. So the cool thing is, though, it is available in the settings. You can change it back to how it works. I just kind of wish that they would have just left the android default versus doing their own skin thing, but the fact that they give you the option to change it back. That's just still nice to have so yeah overall software on this phone.

It's really not that bad at all like. I could easily see myself getting used to it over time, but the problem comes in when we talk about software updates. So, first, mid-range and budget, android phones have never been great about getting the new version of android, like whatever version of android you got is most likely. The version you're gonna, be on forever with that phone, so getting a guarantee from TCL that you're going to get at least android 11 on this phone is good, but I can't help but feel at this point that it's just not enough anymore. This phone costs the same price as an iPhone SC with the same amount of storage, and that phone is going to get updates for at least three years, if not more so, guaranteeing just one year worth of updates.

It's just not cutting it anymore or if you still want an android device, you can get the Pixel 3a, which is guaranteed another three years of updates, and even though it came out last year, it's more likely to see android 12, unlike this phone, which just sucks and then finally last thing I want to cover in this review was the battery life and the miscellaneous stuff that I learned about this phone while using it, so battery life is actually a real highlight on this phone. It's a 4, 500 William hour battery, which paired with a low power, snapdragon 675 lets this phone run for an entire day easily, like you can easily get the next day without charging your phone. I normally get around six to eight hours of screen on time and yeah battery life is just not something that I'm worried about at all. With this phone they do include also a fat 18 watt fast charger in the box. So that's really.

Nice 18 watts is a little slow these days for android devices, and it does take a while to charge the battery. But honestly, it doesn't really matter that much and of course it's also lacking wireless charging. But at this price point not many phones have it, and it would even take longer to charge your phone with that all right and then let's talk about some miscellaneous stuff. So first, this is a GSM only phone, but it's actually certified to use on Verizon. Now how well it's gonna work, I don't know since you can't use CDMA with it.

So if you don't have good 4g coverage, I don't know what it's going to be like, but I've been using on T-Mobile, and it works just fine with that which actually, let me tell you one other thing about this, but you know one thing that I don't think gets mentioned enough is how much slower mid-range smartphones are at connecting to your network than flagship phones. So I tested this phone against my pixel 4 on Wi-Fi and my pixel pulled down three times the download speed and two times the upload speed on Wi-Fi and on 4g we were. I was getting two times the download speed. Although weirdly I got higher upload speeds on the TCL, I don't know, but honestly, both phones sucked on high up slow speed. So I'm not really counting that one as a win for TCL but yeah, just something.

You should know that if you buy a cheaper android phone, you do tend to get a worse modem, just something that's there. Another thing I want to show you was the back of this phone is glass. Oh, first, it's really well-built smaller phone. It's a glass sandwich like most other flagship smartphones. Are these days and yeah just real built really well.

The back of the phone is a matte texture. So it's nice in that it's relatively it gets almost no fingerprints, although it is a very slippery phone because it doesn't actually have a camera bump. That's pretty cool uh. The flashes are raised just a little tiny bit, but because of the lack of camera bump, this phone does tend to slide around quite a bit. If you leave it on a slanted surface, so I would definitely throw this inside of a case.

Although another thing you should know, I have not seen any actual third-party cases for this phone, yet the phone that you get inside the box is the one you're, probably gonna rock for a while. So you should just know that you can't buy a case right now, but yeah. Those are all some of the small things that I learned while using this phone for about a month now the question is: should you buy this phone? Well, of course the answer is going to be. It depends on what your needs are, but this is a really well-made phone with some pretty great software and features like an IR blaster and a headphone jack that you're not going to find on any other phone. It's also got a flagship level display at about half the price of a normal flagship.

The only people I wouldn't recommend this for is for people who really care about the camera quality, which is just mediocre on this phone like I was, if you really care about camera, I don't want to spend too much, definitely buy the Pixel 3a instead, but yeah for those people and for people who care about software updates, don't buy this phone, but otherwise everybody else. You should maybe consider this one but yeah with that. That's pretty much it for this video like assuming you liked it subscribe, you guys loved it and I will catch you guys in the next one. Bye.

Source : Mitesh Shah