TCL 10L and 10 Pro are excellent mid-range priced android smartphones available in the US.
The TCL 10L and TCL 10 Pro are the primary phones as a part of TCL’s major push into the US, Europe, and Australia. The TCL 10 Pro is a $450 mid-range phone with an excellent display and a simple camera setup. The TCL 10L is a $250 phone with great cameras and an excellent display. Both phones are pretty good and pretty great value purchases.
Hardware
The hardware on the TCL 10 Pro is impressive. The surface of the phone is nice to carry. It also features a pretty nice built quality. It has a great aluminium body and a magnificent glass-coated cover. The front features a 6.47″ FHD+ AMOLED display. There’s a little teardrop notch also. Under the display, there is an in-display fingerprint scanner. It isn’t too fast or too accurate. It feels almost like the sensor within the OnePlus 6T. The rear of the phone is pretty unique. The rear features a matte grey gradient with a bar, making the look incredible. This bar houses the quad-camera and dual flash setup. This is often a distinct look on TCL’s current line-up, making them stand out from the recent “L”-shaped quad-camera layouts.
In the inside, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor, Adreno 612, 128GB of UFS 2.1 Storage, 6GB of LPDDR4x RAM, a 4,500 mAh battery, and a headphone jack. These specs sound great for the $450 priced android phones. These are known to urge slower over time. With software updates, adding a touch more speed headroom would be nice. Except for its worth, we can’t complain. Even with the Snapdragon 675, it feels fast and snappy. The priority is how long it will last.
That 4,500 mAh battery is often charged with 18W Quick Charge 3.0. This charging isn’t too fast by today’s standards but it isn’t too slow. It tops it up during a little over an hour. As for battery life, this phone battery wasn’t incredible or horrendous. All around, we wouldn’t say this is the simplest phone around the world or the worst. The features look great for a $450 phone, though.
Display
The display on the TCL 10L UK is perhaps amongst the most straightforward LCD panels we’ve seen in a while. We had to counter check the specification sheet to be sure that we didn’t make an error. It’s that good. The colours look rich and vibrant without being incredibly over-saturated. It all around looks great. There isn’t much discolouration at angles, and it gets bright while exposed to sunlight. It doesn’t get super bright, but that’s fine for the $250 tag.
There is a hole-punch camera, and it’s relatively large. It’s not overlarge, just like the P40 Pro or S10 5G, but it’s a good size. It’s not going to disturb your viewing experience, and it doesn’t look regrettable. One of the best things about this phone has on the LCD panel is shadows. There’s a touch of a dark shadow around the punch hole and corners of this display. This is often just the character of an LCD panel, and that’s fine since it’s a $250 phone.
Camera
The TCL 10L camera is specialized for the worth, but the TCL 10 Pro leaves tons to be desired within the camera department. The pictures are social-media-ready. All colours are vibrant and saturated. The HDR isn’t great all the time, and tons of photos are hit or miss due to this. It depends on the scene and lighting. These drawbacks are easier to ignore on the cheaper phone due to its pricing.
Software
The Quick Settings tiles are pretty like Android Oreo. It’s missing the circular style that has become popular in skins like One UI, Oxygen OS, and stock Android. This isn’t a problem, but a design choice.
There aren’t many stock TCL apps replacing Google apps. In most cases, the apps are Google apps. The default messenger and phone apps are from Google, along with Chrome as a browser. There are a couple of unnecessary apps included, though. TCL includes a file-sharing app called “File Share”, while this could be useful for a few families with all TCL phones. This feature is not available for many people.
