TCL Makes Cheap TVs and... Phones?? - 10L & 10 Pro By ShortCircuit

- My expectations going into this one were pretty low. I mean, the way that I know TCL is as that budget TV brand that managed to sell so many budget TVs that they got a big enough R&D budget to start making actually, really good TVs. So I expected kind of a similar paradigm. These things would be good enough as long as you only have a couple hundred bucks to spend on a phone, but it's gonna take them five years to make anything decent. And then I saw the reviewer's guide, and I'm not talkin' like the flashy marketing terms in the reviewer's guide. They call it, what do they call this thing? A Dotch display? Which basically just means it has a hole punch, get it? It's a dot, notch, Dotch.

I'm talking the level of transparency, and evidently thought, that has gone into seemingly every aspect of these phones. I mean, there is a level of maturity in at least the feature set, anyway, that I would've expected from a phone manufacturer that's been doing this for five years, not just a couple. Okay, so you got a SIM removal tool and some other stuff including, oh, look at that, they've got a case. Display Greatness, wow. That is tacky.

USB Type-C cable and wall wart. Is this a decent wall wart or is it like a budget one? Five-volt, two amps, so this'll be a low-speed wall wart with the 10L. Let's have a look at what we got with the Pro. Got the phone itself. Got basically the exact same thing here, but this one better not have that Display Greatness nonsense, aw, it does.

(sighs) I mean, I can see why they wanna wear that on their sleeves or, well, really on your sleeve, because that's their focus. They're going, "Okay, hey. "Where's our credibility in the phone market? "We make good TVs, those have screens. "Phones have screens, so that should work out "great for everyone, right?" We'll see. USB-C cable.

It's good, everything should have USB-C charging. And hey, there it is, nine-volt, two amps. So this one can apparently take the 10 Pro from zero to 50% battery in about half an hour. I mean, it's pretty standard fare these days, but it's nice to see on affordable offerings, I guess. Interestingly, the 10L comes with a screen protector while the 10 Pro does not, probably because the 10 Pro has this kinda sexy 2.5D glass that we first saw on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and that I still like. Basically like an S8 Plus clone, really, if you wanna compare it directly to anything.

And then for this, this feels quite a lot more budget. Even the back doesn't have that same sort of slickness to the glass. Both of them have quad-camera setups, though, which I thought was pretty interesting. Now, whether or not you get any decent results outta them, that remains to be seen. But both of them have quad cameras and dual flashes on them.

Let's fire 'em up. Immediately, the difference in display technology between these two is stark. And not just the difference in display technology, but the difference in display calibration. The LCD-1 is clearly more purple, while the OLED on the Pro is more like what I would expect from this "hi there" Android startup page. This does not actually bode well for a company that is supposed to be a display specialist.

And there is a lot of color shift and brightness loss when you're viewing the 10L from off-axis. This is definitely a budget display compared to, well, at least to the Pro, anyway. Kind of a green cast to the Pro, too, which is interesting. I mean, let's get into the display settings 'cause you never know, they might have some goofy high-vibrancy mode on by default or something dumb like that. Ooh, the haptic feedback is not great on this one.

That's something I would turn off immediately. We're in an age where good haptic feedback is something that I expect, and this is very several generations ago. The Pro is quite a bit better, though. Oh good, updates out of the box, my favorite. I guess updates is better than no updates.

That's something that would really give me pause going into one of these, especially at a higher price. They have committed to Android 10 and 11, but there's no commitment past 11, and that is really the big issue with budget Android handsets is that, yeah, you're paying half the price compared to an iPhone, but you're also getting half as long to use it compared to an iPhone when you talk about the software support-side of things. That's something that I'd really like to see if you wanna break out as a phone brand. These guys have done a great job of good messaging and good features and just amazing transparency. They get right into all the chips that they're using, all the sensors that they're using.

So this one right here is a Snapdragon 675. Pretty low-end for something with a Pro moniker on it at this point in time, but for most people I would make the argument that it's actually kind of fast enough as long as everything else is up to snuff. It's got six gigs of RAM on the Pro model, 128 gigs of storage, Micro SD expansion, which is really nice to see. No 5G, but it does have 4G. And it's got a headphone jack, and is that? No way, is an IR blaster? Hold on a second.

"Your software is compatible with an IR blaster. " Dang! So you can use this thing as a universal remote. That's a feature that I really wish still existed. The other top-level features are a 4500 milliamp-hour battery, 64-megapixel main shooter, and yes, an underscreen fingerprint sensor. Moving over to the L, it definitely lacks some of the cutting-edge features of the Pro.

So it's got a rear fingerprint sensor. That's a 48-megapixel main shooter amongst a generally less-capable camera loadout. It's actually got a Snapdragon 665 rather than a 675, so this isn't even like a flagship midrange processor. And while it does still have six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage, a SIM slot and Micro SD slot and a headphone jack, one of the biggest compromises is, as I've alluded to already, the screen. So where the Pro has an OLED, this one uses an LCD that really has not impressed me so far.

Interestingly, TCL has you use your dominant hand to choose which side the Back button is on. I'm right-handed, and I do prefer the Back button on my right. We can see what NextVision versus not-NextVision looks like. I can already tell I don't like it. It's like a contrast/sharpness/saturation enhancement.

Oh, one thing I didn't mention is that the 10L has a 4000-milliamp-hour battery compared to the 10 Pro's 4500-milliamp-hour battery. Enough of what's different about them. Let's talk things in common again. So they both do have that cool multi-Bluetooth feature that I mentioned before, and they've also both got this, which is what they call their smart button. So you can press once for some action, press twice for some other, more different action, and press and hold for a third action.

This is basically what the Bixby button should've been in the first place. So let's see what they're configured to by default. Oh, look at that! They just let you set it up. Oh, cool, so you can launch different camera modes. That's pretty sweet.

This could be better. It would be nice if you could just open any app you want. Open a feature? Oh, open an app, hey, look at that! Very nice, I like it. I'm not a huge fan of buttons that oppose other buttons, just 'cause it's kinda easy to accidentally mash them. I mean, the good news is you can at least just disable it if you don't like it.

Naturally, the good old classic rear fingerprint scanner is faster, so you'll actually quick-draw this one faster than you can quick-draw the Pro. Let's look at how we're doin' in terms of bloatware. So you've got Netflix, you've got their Optimize, which is something that you can configure your smart to button to do, is just kinda close all your background tasks at once. Facebook, Netflix. Just like the usual Google apps.

Actually not that much garbage on here. Wait, radio? Don't tell me this has an FM tuner, shut up! "Connect the headset, it functions as a radio antenna," oh. Okay, yeah, okay. Well, hey, that's better than not having a headphone jack and not having a radio antenna, I guess. Overall, this is lookin' pretty stock Android AF here right now.

Visual enhancement, screen color. Okay, we're in vivid, I want standard. Gimme that standard, please. Dang! They've got a system-wide dark mode, very nice. Hi, kitty.

This is a nice feature. You usually see this on Chinese phones and it's making its way over to other ones, as well. App cloner, so you can have multiple instances of some apps including Facebook, Messenger, Snapchat, most of your messaging apps, where it might be useful to have multiple accounts signed in at once. Curiously, this appears to be a 64-gig phone, when I think my documentation says 128 gig. So the L might be up to 128 gig there.

Yes, it is. Hi sweetheart. (shutter clicks) It automatically recognized that this is, in fact, a cat, and switched over to cat mode. (shutter clicks) Wow, that is a really loud shutter sound. Okay, volume buttons act as a shutter.

(shutter clicking) Ooh, hi! What a pretty picture! That's a lot better than I expected, to be perfectly honest with you. I need to turn off that stupid watermark, that's for sure. Oh, that's kind of cool. You can see previews in their camera app of what all the different lenses will look like. Original, ultra-wide, low light, video.

So that's a really low-resolution sensor, but designed for very poor lighting conditions. Interesting. Both of them are using pixel binning by default. So 16 megapixels here and 12 megapixels here, down from 64 and 48. If you have very good light you might wanna switch up to the high-pixel mode, but probably a good call for what we're doing right now.

Hey, kitty cat, can you come back so I can get a quick video sample? Hi! Ooh, hi there! Both of them have a shutter button that you can press while you are recording video. That's a feature that I actually use a lot, just because you're recording everyone singing "Happy Birthday," but you're never gonna actually gonna watch the video again. You just want the picture, so that way you kind of cover your bases for both of 'em. Hey! Stabilization seem reasonable. And auto-focus is actually not bad.

Let's see what happens if we switch lenses. So we'll try it on the 10L. So they both go to 2X, but you get an additional slider on the 10 Pro. Let's find something far away. So there's the 10L, we've got the 2X and 1X.

Oh, actually, you've got this nice slider on the 10L, as well. So you can go all the way to 10X, but that's obviously not usable. Let's try the same exercise on the 10 Pro. Okay, 1X, 2X, let's slide it all the way to 10X. It's better, definitely not amazing, but definitely better.

I was expecting the cameras to be immediately and obviously awful. That's usually a big differentiator for budget phones, especially from inexperienced brands, but I would say they're gonna be usable. Man, if I'm selfieing like that. Ooh, there's a lotta beauty smoothing going on. Okay, hold on a second.

Front-facing camera does 1080p video, though, so that's nice. Okay, so let's try a picture without face beauty. Hey, look at that. Even without face beauty I'm still beautiful. That is not a very sharp camera.

Interesting. I had wanted to use a movie that I know well on Netflix to judge the display on this thing, and unfortunately it prompts you to update your Netflix app, and then when you update it says it's no longer compatible with this device. "Contact the developers of your device. " Growing pains, I guess, but that is one of the things that can come with buying a phone from a brand that just doesn't have that experience. I don't know, what they hey, let's just throw "Avengers" on here.

Oh, TCL, you done sinned! Mono speaker on the Pro! How's our max brightness? They claim it's in the neighborhood of 600 nits and is Netflix HDR10-certified. It does appear that HDR10 is working. It looks all right. Definitely a little bit of clipping in the highlights on the reflection on the floor there. Yeah, it's pretty good and the HDR is definitely working.

You know, it's amazing how good a midrange phone processor performs these days. I'm just casually browsing lttstore. com, I got my movie running in the background. I don't take this for granted, you know. I had a BlackBerry! Summary time, then.

On the 10L there's a preloaded app, Netflix, that doesn't launch on the phone due to a compatibility issue. I have to hope that they're gonna sort that out, but it does give me some hesitation when it comes to what the software support's gonna look like. If these guys wanna stand out, I think saying, "Hey, we're gonna do Android 11 and 12," might be a really good way to do that. Other than that, they are looking pretty darn good for value phones after the little bit of tweaking that I had to do on the 10 Pro to make the display not look like dog's garbage. Mono speakers, that's a drag for me because the earpiece speaker is there.

All you had to do was amplify it. But the fact that there's a headphone jack as well as Micro SD expansion means that these are looking pretty competitive. And the camera is better than I expected, for sure, not that I have rigorously benchmarked it. The one thing I've saved for myself 'til the end is the actual price. I know that they're value phones, but I don't know the exact pricing.

So I'm opening that up now. The 10 Pro is gonna be $449 U. S. That's lookin' pretty compelling, ain't it? Now let's have a look at the 10L. $249.

Wow, you can sure get a lot of phone for 250 bucks. Now, if the software only lasts for a year or two, being up to date, this at half the price of an iPhone is less compelling to me than if you get two years outta this for 250 bucks. Not bad. Overall build quality, definitely not as premium, but no obvious snappiness issues. And wow, that is a lot of phone for 250 bucks.

So thanks for watching "Short Circuit. " This has been the TCL 10 Pro and 10L. Make sure you get subscribed and all that good stuff. See ya in the next one.

Source : ShortCircuit