TCL 10 Pro review
Our Verdict
The TCL 10 Pro offers almost everything yous could want in a $450 phone, including a stellar pattern, long battery life and a gorgeous display. However, the camera performance could exist amend.
For
- Corking overall performance
- Impressive OLED display
- 128GB storage
- Premium design
- Stiff bombardment life
Confronting
- Cameras are hit-or-miss
- Gaming performance not the best
- Limited to GSM carriers
Tom'south Guide Verdict
The TCL x Pro offers almost everything you could want in a $450 phone, including a stellar design, long battery life and a gorgeous display. However, the camera performance could exist better.
Pros
- +
Corking overall performance
- +
Impressive OLED display
- +
128GB storage
- +
Premium design
- +
Strong bombardment life
Cons
- -
Cameras are hit-or-miss
- -
Gaming performance not the best
- -
Limited to GSM carriers
TCL 10 Pro specs
Cost: $449
Os: Android ten with TCL UI
Display: 6.47-inch AMOLED (2340x1080)
CPU: Snapdragon 675
RAM: 6GB
Storage: 128GB; expandable upward to 256GB
Rear photographic camera: Quad-lens: 64MP wide (ƒ/1.8), 16MP ultrawide (ƒ/ii.4), 5MP macro (ƒ/2.ii), 2MP low-light (ƒ1.8)
Forepart photographic camera: 24MP (ƒ/two.2)
Battery: iv,500 mAh
Size: six.24 x 2.85 ten 0.34 inches
Weight: vi.6 ounces
Well-known TV maker TCL has been building phones for years — just not ones with its proper name on the dorsum. That'south irresolute, starting with the $449 TCL 10 Pro.
The 10 Pro isn't the only new telephone from TCL; at that place's likewise the $249 TCL 10 L and, quondam over the summer, a 5G variant will emerge for less than $500. But this Pro model is nevertheless the range-topper in many ways, equally it's the only ane of the trio with an OLED display, and it sports the most stunning design of the bunch.
Our TCL 10 Pro review reveals a telephone that marks a strong debut for TCL in the e'er-competitive arena of midrange handsets that's been dominated by Google and Apple as of belatedly. While the TCL 10 Pro isn't perfect, it'due south even so among the best inexpensive phones you lot tin buy, and a compelling option for anyone on the hunt for a premium design, flagship-caliber display and long battery life for under $500 — so long as y'all don't mind the average cameras.
TCL 10 Pro review: Price and release date
The TCL 10 Pro reached stores May 19 for $449 unlocked, and information technology comes in only one configuration and color — 128GB of storage with 6GB of RAM, in the Ember Gray shade. TCL offers the 10 Pro in other, more interesting colors elsewhere in the world, simply unfortunately gray is all on offering in the U.S.
There'south a microSD slot in the TCL 10 Pro, and information technology accepts cards up to 256GB in size. Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon sell the telephone, and y'all'll be able to take it to GSM carriers, like AT&T, T-Mobile and Metro. Unfortunately, the lack of CDMA bands means that the 10 Pro doesn't fully support carriers like Verizon, Sprint and Boost Mobile.
In Canada, the TCL 10 Pro is offered at Bell for $700 CAD and Telus for $665 CAD. Canadians can also go a gratuitous 43-inch TCL Boob tube (a $319 CAD value) with the buy of a TCL 10 Pro; all you accept to practise is get to TCL's website to annals your buy and get in on the bargain.
TCL ten Pro review: Pattern
While the TCL 10 Pro technically qualifies as a midrange handset, TCL doesn't sell a phone that'due south more expensive, and and so this $449 telephone really serves equally something of a flagship for the brand.
Thankfully, the TCL x Pro looks like a flagship, too. We're used to seeing concessions in pattern and build quality at this toll bespeak: The Pixel 3a and Samsung Galaxy A51 are made from polycarbonate, rather than metal and glass, while the new iPhone SE 2020 repurposes a very, very sometime design that likely doesn't cost Apple much to go on pumping out these days.
The TCL 10 Pro, however, isn't molded from plastic at all. Instead, information technology sports a solid, powder-coated metal chassis with a satiny, matte-etched glass dorsum that looks and feels similar to what OnePlus employs on some of its products. Couple those materials with the 10 Pro'due south full-screen design, and suddenly, TCL has a blueprint winner on its hands.
In fact, I'd become then far as to say that this isn't simply 1 of the all-time-designed phones under $500 — it is the best. I peculiarly love the way the quad cameras and dual-LED wink have been lined upwardly horizontally around the dorsum, in a sleeky strip that breaks up the frosted texture blanketing the balance of the sheet of glass. The ten Pro would exist an attractive $800 telephone, but at its actual $449 price, it feels truly special.
Mind you, it'due south not perfect. The 10 Pro'due south display is steeply curved on its sides and that can atomic number 82 to some unintentional touches, which gets pretty annoying. There'due south simply one speaker on this phone, and it's on the bottom right, meaning sound tin can get easily muffled as y'all're playing games. There's likewise no IP-rated water resistance or wireless charging on board here, though those aren't surprising omissions in this segment.
In that location are still a couple more positives worth noting, however. The first is the ten Pro'south headphone jack, which resides on the upper top edge and means y'all won't take to ditch those trusty quondam wired earbuds for an expensive wireless pair.
The second is the in-display optical fingerprint sensor, which isn't the fastest scanner in the world, but quick enough and, more chiefly, pretty authentic. In fact, I've experienced less false negatives with the 10 Pro'due south sensor than the one inside the Galaxy A51, especially when attempting to unlock the TCL 10 Pro after washing and drying my easily. TCL'south arrangement is fifty-fifty quite practiced at reading your prints when the phone is lying flat on a table, which I find to be a claiming with most optical scanners.
TCL 10 Pro review: Display
Front end and center on the TCL 10 Pro, yous'll detect the phone'southward 6.47-inch Nxtvision AMOLED display, which packs a full-HD resolution and HDR ten certification. Nxtvision is TCL'due south branding for its proprietary display engine, which is borrowed from the company's own television panels.
However, Nxtvision is more than a backside-the-scenes engineering science — it's also an app inside the 10 Pro that allows you to tune the appearance of the console to your liking. When Nxtvision visual enhancement is on, contrast and colors are adjusted in existent fourth dimension to take advantage of the screen'due south broad color gamut. A carve up SDR-to-HDR option allows yous to become non-HDR content upwardly to spec, though to my optics, this setting doesn't brand a world of deviation. Occasionally it amounts to a slight-only-appreciated saturation boost, while other times it adds a little also much dial to intentionally-dim or muted scenes.
Of form, you can turn all this off if y'all like to, and opt for a center-of-the-road Standard colour contour or an fifty-fifty more toned-downward Gentle option that appears to be emulating sRGB with no flashy effects. I preferred the Standard look personally, and nether that guise I was impressed as I watched the trailer for Netflix'due south Infinite Force, taken in by the view of a rocket perched and ready for launch beneath an endless silvery-blue desert sky.
On Standard mode, the TCL 10 Pro covered 172.three% of the sRGB color space. That translates to noticeably more than vibrant colors than the 111.2% iPhone SE, which utilizes an LCD panel. However, the iPhone'south hues were more realistic, as Apple tree'south phone notched a Delta-E score of 0.20 compared to the TCL'southward 0.28 (numbers closer to zero are better).
All that's well and good, and if that were the stop of the display conversation, I'd rather accept the TCL'southward panel, as it'due south rare to find an OLED screen this good for such a low price. But for all TCL's Nxtvision bells and whistles, the 10 Pro's display comes upwardly short in one very important respect: brightness. Whereas the iPhone SE can be cranked all the way upward to 625 nits, this handset tops out at 398 nits, making outdoor viewing a little more difficult than it should exist.
TCL ten Pro review: Camera
TCL says the brandish was primarily the focus for its first series of phones, though, judging by the quantity of lenses on the back of the TCL 10 Pro, information technology hasn't skimped on cameras, either.
The quad-lens camera organization on offer hither combines a 64-megapixel main wide-bending shooter with a 16-MP ultrawide i, a 5-MP macro camera and a 2-MP sensor devoted to low-light shots. The front end of the TCL 10 Pro features a 24-MP camera which, information technology must be said, is more megapixels than you typically go for selfies.
Photos captured with the x Pro's 64-MP main lens incorporate quad-pixel binning to let more light to reach the sensor, so the result is 12-MP regardless. That equals the iPhone SE'south resolution, and thus, this pair of shots of a mandevilla flower from both phones are similarly precipitous. However, at that place'southward a massive gap in color and detail; the hues on the TCL phone are boosted into the stratosphere, such that the texture of the petals and leaves are totally absent. Imperfections that are noticeable on the iPhone SE'south take are curiously absent in the ten Pros' rendition, as they've been smoothed over with excessive mistiness.
What makes this particular comparison worse is that you're seeing an example of the kinds of photos the TCL 10 Pro delivers when its AI scene detection engine is off. When that characteristic is on, the colors are even more ridiculous, with a degree of middle-searing oversaturation I've rarely seen from a smartphone photographic camera, fifty-fifty at this low price. These photos were taken on a sunny 24-hour interval, and the flower is naturally vibrant; it definitely didn't need any postal service processing to enhance those colors, and yet, TCL'southward software went that far anyhow.
Thankfully, things brainstorm to settle down when yous compare the 10 Pro's 16-MP ultrawide lens to the 12-MP one in Samsung'due south Milky way A51. In that location's something nigh the farthermost contrast of the A51's shot that draws your heart in, just it'south false. TCL's camera picked upwards the actual lighting of the scene, teasing more lavender out of the flowers on the crape myrtle tree to the right, while nailing the gradient of whites and grays composing the clouds overhead. The ten Pro's epitome also isn't quite every bit noisy in the shadowy regions, similar correct beneath the roof of the business firm.
Macro cameras are condign increasingly more common, especially in cheaper phones. The TCL x Pro features a 5-MP sensor just for those shots, like to the Milky way A51. The A51'southward macro lens is one of the few impressive standout features about its camera assortment, just I prefer shooting with the TCL 10 Pro'due south macro, both because it proved quicker to focus in testing and because it allows y'all to get closer.
In capturing this wind chime, notice how the ring around the marble is e'er so slightly out of focus in the Galaxy's shot, nevertheless is rendered crisply past TCL's phone. I also prefer the mode the x Pro lit the groundwork, with improve dynamic range that properly captured the off-white siding of the firm.
The TCL 10 Pro likewise has a mode for shooting in depression-light atmospheric condition, called Super Dark Manner, and above you lot can encounter how it compares to Google's implementation of Night Sight in the Pixel 4. Now, this isn't a totally fair comparing; the Pixel 4 is, of course, a legitimate flagship, rather than a midranger like the TCL 10 Pro. That said, I didn't have a Pixel 3a on hand when conducting this TCL 10 Pro review, and besides, sometimes it'southward skilful to see precisely what you're missing when opting for a cheaper phone over a pricier one.
Unsurprisingly, the Pixel 4's endeavour is better across the lath; information technology'due south sharper, it's brighter and it manages to boom all the details, fifty-fifty the door lock in the lower-right corner of the frame. That said, Google'southward software bathes everything in a warm light, which is 1 detail pitfall the 10 Pro'due south Super Dark Fashion doesn't suffer. It'due south rare to see a compelling low-low-cal setting on a budget device — well, aside from the Pixel 3a — and this is a particular surface area where TCL'southward fabricated sacrifices, fifty-fifty despite this handset'south dedicated lens for dim scenarios.
Finally, nosotros see how the 10 Pro'southward selfie lens compares to the iPhone SE'south 7-MP front-facing shooter. One time once again, even though the sensor in TCL'southward camera starts with more pixels, it'southward binning them together so that rather than 24-MP shots, y'all cease up with a 6-MP product. That may explicate why the TCL'due south rendition isn't quite equally abrupt as the iPhone'due south, but at that place are various other ways in which the x Pro falls behind here. Half my confront is blown out; my beard and hair are blurry; and for some reason, the telephone made no attempt to correct for the heaven above, resulting in white-hot clouds that ruin the result.
The TCL 10 Pro'southward selfie performance is probably its biggest letdown. In other respects, withal, this is a middle-of-the-road midrange mobile camera. Information technology'southward certainly not at the level of the iPhone SE or Pixel 3a, but there are also worse options out there for the money, and at least having a plethora of lenses at your disposal offers a bit of versatility Apple's and Google'southward handsets lack.
TCL ten Pro review: Operation
The TCL 10 Pro comes powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 675 processor — an evolution of the Snapdragon 670 chipset in the Pixel 3a — and 6GB of RAM. That combination makes it one of the most powerful phones under $500 today — well, so long as you ignore the A13 Bionic-powered iPhone SE.
That iPhone is the exception among budget phones, though. And for what you're paying, the Snapdragon 675 is a capable bit, fast enough to go on Android running every bit fluidly equally it does on Snapdragon 865-powered flagships. You lot'll notice some dropped frames and lower-resolution graphics during demanding titles, like Asphalt ix Legends. About of the time, though, you lot'd be hard-pressed to choice out the differences.
Different with the Exynos-powered Milky way A51 I recently reviewed, the TCL 10 Pro opens apps in a snap, even if they're not already loaded into memory. It boots fast and responds instantaneously to gestures, as well. With a multicore Geekbench five score of i,604, the TCL 10 Pro outpaces the Galaxy A51 (1,293), Pixel 3a (i,336) and Moto K Power (ane,387), indicating superior system-broad operation.
Withal, things become interesting when you turn to graphics. The Snapdragon 675 may better upon the 670 in terms of raw computational ability, only it actually fares worse with polygons, because it packs an Adreno 612 GPU to the older chipset's Adreno 615. And so, TCL's device comes up a bit short in the 1080p Vulkan edition of GFXBench'southward Aztec Ruins test for midrange devices. Where the Pixel 3a clocked 12 frames per 2nd and 783 frames in total, the x Pro manages but 8.v fps, and 546 frames overall.
The TCL 10 Pro performs well overall, simply avid gamers may come away a piddling disappointed.
Numbers are helpful, but the real question is, do the Adreno 612's deficiencies make the TCL ten Pro that much worse to game on compared to similarly-priced handsets? Honestly, I don't retrieve and then.
Samsung'south Milky way A51 seems to handle Asphalt 9 a bit more smoothly than the TCL 10 Pro does on the whole, merely the arcade racer is still certainly playable on TCL'south device, and neither phone tin can run that game properly at maxed settings anyhow. Personally, I think TCL fabricated the right choice in selecting silicon that prioritizes overall functioning compared to graphics muscle, just avid gamers may come away a little disappointed.
TCL 10 Pro review: Battery
Inside the TCL x Pro is a big four,500-mAh battery that kept the phone running for an boilerplate of 10 hours and 47 minutes in Tom's Guide's custom bombardment exam, where devices endlessly load web pages over an LTE network.
That's just 13 minutes shy of the 11-hour mark, where you typically observe the best phone battery life. The TCL 10 Pro doesn't quite land on that list, merely 10:47 is still very impressive; the Milky way A51 simply made it nine hours and xvi minutes, despite carrying a similarly-large 4,000-mAh ability pack, while the iPhone SE fared just 9 hours and 18 minutes. The ten Pro'due south event is a little more than than an 60 minutes shorter than the Pixel 3a'south 11:59 runtime, notwithstanding.
TCL'south device comes with an 18-watt fast charger capable of getting the battery from empty to l% in 35 minutes. That'due south not blistering pace, though information technology's meliorate than yous typically find in nearly inexpensive phones, which brand do with 15-watt charging or a solution even slower than that.
TCL 10 Pro review: Software
The TCL 10 Pro marks our introduction to the TCL UI — the company's front terminate atop Android ten that adds some useful functionality, while moving things effectually a fleck.
Like some other manufacturer Android skins, TCL UI has me divide. On one paw, it's not peculiarly attractive; at that place'southward a lot of oversized text and generic iconography, and TCL'southward system apps only look dated and feel relatively unpolished. At that place are also a lot of frivolous settings that don't seem to make a world of divergence, like Game Turbo style, which is supposed to "make the all-time performance for playing games" only outwardly demonstrates no noticeable change in exercise.
Just and then, TCL UI hatches a few pretty clever ideas — some simple and others more complicated — that add a bit of value rarely seen in this price range. For one, I dearest that when y'all press a volume key as media is playing, playback controls appear underneath the book slider. It's such an obvious yet thoughtful thought, though I've never seen it in whatever other phone.
There's too a programmable Smart Key on the left side of the phone to launch shortcuts or toggle settings, as well as a built-in IR equalizer, meaning the TCL 10 Pro can double as your Television set remote. The latter is a handy feature I wish more phone makers would bring back.
On the other end of the complexity spectrum is Super Bluetooth — a feature that allows the 10 Pro to play audio meantime on up to four split Bluetooth devices. In theory, this characteristic sounds corking, as information technology saves you from having to daisy chain multiple identical speakers to play music across a large infinite.
Unfortunately, though, the execution is lacking. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't go the audio synchronization setup tool to work properly between my UE Smash and Google Home Mini. Sound still lined up reasonably well most of the time, only occasionally savage out of sync by a beat, or was paused when ane of the speakers would drop connection entirely. I applaud TCL's attempt to meliorate Bluetooth, but information technology's such a frustrating technology to begin with, I'one thousand not surprised the implementation is far from perfect.
TCL promises at least one major Android version upgrade for the x Pro, which isn't encouraging but also, unfortunately, is the status quo for cheap Android phones. Google supports all its Pixel devices with three years of updates, while you can expect even more than that from Apple for the new iPhone SE.
TCL 10 Pro review: Verdict
Out of nowhere, TCL has arrived on the scene with a sub-$500 smartphone that's actually worth buying.
Sure, the TCL 10 Pro doesn't accept cameras to match those of the iPhone SE or Google'south budget Pixels, and it leaves something to be desired in terms of gaming functioning and software. Nevertheless, this device gets enough of everything else right that it's at least a better pick for a mid-range Android handset than the Galaxy A51, which is quite an achievement for an up-and-coming make looking to plant itself against icons similar Samsung.
The ten Pro largely succeeds considering of its combination of high-quality blueprint with more satisfying materials than you lot typically see at this price, alongside strong everyday performance and long battery life. Plus, the 128GB of built-in storage is merely icing on the block in terms of value. It'south as skillful a debut as a visitor with everything to show could have hoped for.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/tcl-10-pro
Posted by: boyleclot1951.blogspot.com
0 Response to "TCL 10 Pro review"
Post a Comment