TCL 10L and 10 Pro Review - New Budget Smartphones By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review on oh happy days. Lately we see that every new smartphone doesn't have to be a thousand dollars or more. These are the TCL 10 L and 10 Pro. So these are affordable phones. The 10 L is 250 bucks. The pro is $450.

These are unlocked, GSM, 4G, LTE phone, so if you're on CDMA carrier, which means Sprint Verizon right now, not so much for you, we're looking them now. So the 10 L has a six and a half inch display and that's an LCD non OLED display which for $250 hey, that's fair, it's full HD plus resolution, and you have a snapdragon 665, which is a mid-range CPU, which again is fair for the price. Interestingly enough, though, you get six gigs around, which is pretty beefy for a budget phone and 64 gigs of storage, but there's a micro SD card slot, so yeah that you can expand storage, the 10 Pro ups, the game with better cameras, we'll talk about that a little later in the camera section, and you get a slightly higher end. Snapdragon mid-range CPU, the 675, still six gigs around about 128 gigs of based storage, again with a micro SD card slot, the pro gets you an OLED or AMOLED display Full HD plus resolution again, so they call the LCD on the more affordable 10 out a dodo display like not a notch, I guess because there's a little camera up in the corner. The 10 Pro has a kind of teardrop in the center where the front-facing selfie camera lives.

It's either way, I leave it up to you. One thing I will say: the OLED display is obviously gonna, be the prettier one, and they have their next vision display terminology. No TCL is a company that you probably know from TVs. They say they're, the second-biggest manufacturer of TVs in the world, and also they're ? company behind blackberry, Android funds and Alcatel phones, but anyway, so they're claiming their using submit a great display chops from coming from TVs in these panels. So the only this thing is rather nice-looking and there's a bunch of settings on both of these phones that you can use to kind of do.

SDR HDR and control the vividness and all that sort of thing, but the only display is the curved one curved on the sides and boys like no accidental edge protection. It's been driving me crazy. It reminds me of like the first iteration ever of an edge display. Furthermore, it's really annoying. So in that way, that's one thing: I prefer about the 10 L, which has a traditional flat display no Kirby big curvy edges on the Sun.

That one is not a bad display, and it's not nearly as beautiful and vibrant. Okay there's that, but it has a slight pink color cast, and it seems to me they can play with the color balance and settings on it. But the thing about these two phones really is the fact that you get a big display and pretty nice quality displays, even though I'm picking on the LCD a little, it's still a pretty nice, despite for relatively little money. So that's going to be the strong point of these phones. Another selling point is there is actually a headphone jack, oh my god right and your usual USB-C port as well.

When it comes to audio speaking of headphone jacks for Bluetooth audio, it has something they call super Bluetooth, so it can connect to up to four Bluetooth headphones or speakers at months. Is that useful I'd leave that up to you to decide the Bluetooth profile supports actually pretty good to not just app decks but APDEX HD, AAC and L DAC for you audio file type, so those are some higher quality, audio codecs for when you're streaming over Bluetooth. So again, the TTL 10 L, the less expensive phone pulls ahead a little because it has a fingerprint scanner on the back. I know a lot of you missed that and like that and for me, it worked just fine and the 10 Pro. You have an in display fingerprint scanner, which also worked pretty well for me.

I've seen some reviewers complaining, but I haven't had any problems with it other than the locations kind of too far down towards the bottom of the phone. So you really have to support it. You know, so you don't accidentally drop it, but they both have to deflation recognition, which is not terribly secure time, but unless you're really important person and people are carrying around life-size pictures of you, that's probably, okay. When it comes to the design. These are actually very nice-looking phones, which is not unlike the iPhone SE 20/20 Edition and the Samsung Galaxy 851 they're, more affordable, Android phones that we just looked at your glass backs on here.

So this stands out a little of say from the Moto G family, which typically are very affordable and good features, but they look kind of plastic and not very exciting. These actually look really nice, so the 10 L gets the pretty blue back and the pro gets a kind of frosted finish gray yeah, it's great, but the frosted finish is kind of nice. Despite that, they're both slippery phones, I feel like for some reason, I find the frosted glass back when actually a little slippery. Thank god there's a clear CPU case in the box with each one of these. That power button on the side is also very easy to press accidentally.

Often that buttons a little sip stiffer another phone, so it doesn't depress quite so easily, so I found I was hitting it when I didn't want to hit a lot, be my only design complaint. Otherwise, these look pretty darn nice. They have long strips of cameras on the back. A lot of camera lenses here again, which we'll talk about it, they're fairly, well integrated into the design and again beauty is in the eye of the beholder I'll leave that up to you, but I think that they've done a pretty good job, especially given the price point of these phones. There is no wireless charging here and there is no IP water resistance or dust resistance, again, pretty fair for the price, so we're not going to ding them on that again, 4G LTE here and unlocked GSM.

If you want 5g, they say: they're going to have a 10 5g model later this year, but I don't think it's coming to the United States. We have an ambient display here and always-on display, and we have a quick access button, so you can use it to launch Google Assistant or whatever you want. In fact, you can program it for a single press, double press and that's pretty nice I, like that. This is Android 10. That's a good thing! That's still the current version of Android with TCL's DUI in some of it's good, sometimes bad.

They throw a lot of software at you on this, and you can fix this at least because you can change your preferences for this. But the default is to organize your app drawer in different categories that make sense to the folks at TCL, but not so much, maybe to me or to you, but you can go with normal alphabetical, look and other kind of Frizz I just hate, seeing software there for the sake of software, and it feels a little like that, the rest of it, the settings and all that modification is pretty light pretty fine. Most of it really is geared towards that display. They have a lock feature to lock folders. If you want to do that and something to keep the phone optimized and running good, which a lot of manufacturers do again.

If you get that 10 Pro, you get something you don't see anymore, which is an IR blaster, otherwise known as your wireless TV remote control, your TV control, your stereo kind of makes sense, since TCL is in that business that they would have that feature. So if you miss that which we haven't seen forever well, it's actually here, and you can control a variety of AV gear and even air conditioners. The regular 10 L does not get that feature so, as you might guess, the 10 probably supposed to have the better cameras here. We've got super night mode, but it's pretty useless. You can see a picture.

I took just using regular mode versus super night mode. One is not better than the other and neither are very good and that wasn't even in a very dark room. It was just in a pretty dim room. So for the price you know we don't expect too much with night mode, but if you're thinking about something I got a pixel, 3a or 3/8 X L, maybe that will certainly take a lot better pictures than either one of these. The pro has the higher resolution camera.

You can see the specs on screen right now is 64 megapixels, main shooter versus 48, so we're all megapixel rage. You know a lot of camera phones have high megapixel ratings, I will say about the 10 L that it shows more barrel distortion, whether it's the main, which is your typical base, wide-angle or the ultra wide-angle, it's better controlled with the 10 Pro, and that's even with software control to control distortion. That's available for both of these and the pictures on the 10 L of the photos, sometimes you're good, it's kind of up and down mostly in good light, they're good. But if there's any high contrast scene, if you got sun-dappled on the sidewalk, you're going to get overexposed spots and all that sort of thing and video on both of these tends to be a little dark, sometimes, but particularly the 10 L. It's dark.

It's color, noisy it's not really good-looking at all, but on the 10 pro and good lighting outdoor is, it can take some pretty decent video and the electronic stabilization, because no optical hardware stabilization in this price range. It does a fairly good job. Furthermore, it doesn't look dirty lurch, jumpy at all, so better that, and you have usual fast motion, stop motion, slow motion, kind of features. You can get slower, slow motion if you go with the 10 Pro. The interesting thing with both of these is that you don't get a telephoto lens, which I feel sad about I love that for doing portraits of people for doing pets, animals wild animals squirrels even whatever got.

You know right now that you can take a fixture, and it doesn't have that. Instead, we have macro cameras, which seems to be a thing, and then one plus was doing that too, and I don't know how often many of us really want to take macros. Do you love bugs that much I don't, and it's also hard to focus, because these are typically fixed focus linden? So you have to find the right very shallow point when you've got the focus right, 10 Pro does do a better job with macro shots, it does have a portrait mode, and it's fairly good actually and does blur the background um fairly. Well, it's not noisy, not weird overdone and the edge detection is reasonably good on him. So when it comes to the cameras, I would say if the cameras really important to you, the 10 Pro would be the better choice, but then, alternatively, again the pixel 3 AXL, if you're looking for a bigger phone with a really great camera there, it is battery life is pretty good here, as you might guess, you got a mid-range CPU, a full HD plus resolution.

That's some psycho high resolution going on you regularly regular 60 Hertz refresh the spy, so the 10 L has 4000 Williams and the 10 Pro has 4500 Williams. That's a lot we're right up there with the Samsung Galaxy s, 20, plus family and family of phones in the s20 ultra, even with a lot less demanding stuff going on here. So battery life is really very good on these phones, I mean you can do five and a half six hours and screen on time with these phones, depending on what you're doing with your display settings and obviously, if you're playing fortnight, not so much, but if you're browsing the web, then yes, it supports Qualcomm, quick charge.3.0 you get that in the box, along with the USB cable and again that CPU case. So that's the TCL 10 l and the 10 pro, and these will be available on Amazon on May 19th again.250 bucks, 450 bucks also coming to Best, Buy and Walmart at a later date, and they'll be on Canadian carriers later this year as well. TCL does have those Canadian connections after all, so as their first go at self branded phones, rather than using the BlackBerry name or the Alcatel name.

It's a good start. I'll say and the displays on this and the size of the display is pretty big. Phones are the selling points the performance is decent, even for the 10 out, which has the lower end. CPU I didn't really see much lag on it at all, and I was able to play games on it without having terrible problems, if you're a serious gamer. While there are gaming phones and higher in phones.

The challenge also for them is that people do shop. Last year's phones, like you, can look at an older generation OnePlus and get a great phone or a Samsung Galaxy s.9, and you're, probably not gonna, find an S 10 for anything as cheap as $250. Of course, so I'd say the 10 L particularly, is really pushing a little above its way. I'm Lisa from mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tech, videos and thumbs up. If you like, this vid.

Source : MobileTechReview