TCL 10L review
Our Verdict
The TCL 10L has a great screen, especially at this price. But if you value other features similar battery life, cameras and functioning, y'all should turn to the similarly priced Moto Yard Power or Moto G Stylus.
For
- Splendid display
- Low price
- Good blueprint for a budget phone
Confronting
- Cameras struggle with color
- No CDMA support
- Noticeable bloatware
Tom's Guide Verdict
The TCL 10L has a great screen, especially at this price. Simply if you value other features like battery life, cameras and performance, yous should turn to the similarly priced Moto G Power or Moto M Stylus.
Pros
- +
Excellent display
- +
Depression price
- +
Good design for a upkeep phone
Cons
- -
Cameras struggle with color
- -
No CDMA back up
- -
Noticeable bloatware
TCL 10L specs
Price: $249
Bone: Android 10 with TCL UI
Brandish: 6.53-inch LCD (2340 ten 1080)
CPU: Snapdragon 665
RAM: 6GB
Storage: 64GB, expandable via microSD
Rear cameras: 48MP (f/1.8) main, 8MP (f/two.ii) ultra wide, 2MP (f.2.4) macro, 2MP (f/two.iv) depth sensor
Forepart camera: 16MP
Battery: 4,000 mAh
Size: 6.4 x 3 x 0.33 inches
Weight: 6.3 ounces
After years of making phones on behalf of other companies, TCL is building out its own smartphone lineup, and the TCL 10L is proof that budget shoppers aren't going to go lost in the shuffle. The TCL 10 Pro may accept some flashier features, simply the 10L sacrifices some of those in favor of a lower overall price tag.
Where TCL hasn't cut corners is with the brandish on this upkeep phone. The TCL 10L features a vibrant LCD panel that rivals what you might discover on more expensive phones. Only is a dandy brandish enough to overcome some other areas where the TCL 10L doesn't hide its upkeep phone roots?
Our TCL 10L review finds a solid phone for a expert price that looks cracking but falls curt in other areas where the best cheap phones have thrived.
TCL 10L review: Toll and availability
The TCL 10L is definitely the most affordable model in the TCL 10 lineup. It costs $249, which is a $200 disbelieve off the TCL 10 Pro. That puts the L model in the same form of upkeep phones as the $249 Moto G Ability and $299 Moto Chiliad Stylus.
When the phone goes on sale May 19, you'll be able to buy the TCL 10L unlocked at Amazon, All-time Buy and Walmart. The TCL 10L works with any GSM-based carrier (in other words, AT&T, T-Mobile and any disbelieve carrier that uses their networks), but lacks support for CDMA bands.
TCL 10L review: Blueprint
Information technology may be a budget phone, simply the TCL 10L looks pretty stylish from afar. Up shut and in your paw, y'all'll realize this isn't a premium telephone, thank you to its plastic build, just at least the back of the phone is pleasantly curvy and pleasingly glossy.
Credit TCL's choice in colors, at least for the Mariana Bluish model that served every bit my review unit. It'due south a deep blue with hints of purple that shimmers in the lite thank you to the TCL 10L's glossy coating. (You can as well get the phone in Arctic White if that'due south more to your liking.) That glossy dorsum does pick up a lot of fingerprints, only that's a trade-off I'm willing to make for an cheap phone that yet manages to make an try to look good.
Upwardly front end, you'll be staring at a 6.53-inch display that dominates the TCL 10 Fifty'due south look. The phone boasts a 91% screen-to-body ratio thanks to minimal bezels on the top and bottom of the brandish and a cut-out for the front camera in the upper left corner. That also helps the TCL 10L squeeze its screen into a relatively slender 6.iv ten 3 ten 0.33-inch frame. That'south a shade taller than the Moto G Power and Moto G Stylus, though not well-nigh as thick as those two phones.
I call back the thing I appreciate the most nearly the TCL 10L's pattern is simply how low-cal it is. At half-dozen.three ounces, it's lighter than the Moto G Stylus (6.8 ounces) and it makes the 7-ounce Moto G Power feel like a existent chunker. The TCL 10L was certainly easy to tote around, even if the iPhone SE 2020 is more than than an ounce lighter. Only the TCL 10L tin betoken to a 3.5mm headphone jack, something missing from Apple's recent phones.
TCL 10L review: Brandish and audio
It's safe to call the TCL 10L's 6.53-inch LCD panel the centerpiece of this device. TCL is cartoon on its feel as the second largest maker of TVs to bring an eye-catching display fifty-fifty to budget phones. Helping the TCL 10L's screen stand out is the company'southward Nxtvsion technology, which delivers features similar SDR-to-HDR up conversion for providing brighter highlights, increased dissimilarity and bolder colors in real fourth dimension.
TCL'due south display can accommodate display brightness and colour temperature and so that everything'southward better suited to the environment effectually you. A Reading Mode that you can toggle on or set for specific apps delivers a paper-like display to make reading easier on the eyes. (Y'all'll want to use this characteristic sparingly, as it gives everything a yellow cast.) And TCL says its Eye Comfort Mode removes 66 percent of blue light to reduce eye strain.
All of this translates to an enjoyable viewing experience, especially on a budget phone. Watching the Wonder Adult female 1984 trailer, Gal Gadot'southward red and blue body armor sparked on the TCL 10L's screen, which faithfully recreated the 1980s neon look of that motion picture. I was besides impressed with the bright colors in Hail Caesar'due south show-stopping musical number when I watched that movie on Netflix.
Our lab testing confirms that the TCL 10L uses a pretty colorful LCD panel. We found that the display on TCL's budget phone captures 122.one% of the sRGB color spectrum when the TCL 10L is set to its default Vivid mode. That's a much higher percentage than the LCD panel on the Moto K Power, which only captured 97% of the sRGB spectrum. Colors are accurate on the TCL 10L, also — we measured a Delta-Due east rating of 0.22, compared to 0.33 for the Moto G Power and 0.32 for the Moto G Stylus. (Numbers closer to zip are better.)
If I have a gripe about the TCL 10L'southward display, information technology'south that the screen is not very bright. We measured a peak brightness of 422 nits with a light meter, which is a bit on the dim side. The Moto G Ability hitting 500 nits, while the Google Pixel 3a trailed at 401 nits. I did have to max out the TCL 10L's display brightness while taking photos on a sunny day only to see the on-screen camera controls.
There's just i speaker on the TCL 10L, and information technology'south located on the bottom of the telephone. It does an acceptable chore, although I noticed a little bit of a hiss on the drums for The Beatles' Come Together. The bigger issue is that when you're holding the phone in landscape style, your paw is going to cover that speaker, muffling the sound. It's something I definitely noticed when playing PUBG Mobile on the TCL 10L, which fabricated it hard to hear budgeted enemies.
TCL 10L review: Cameras
Fifty-fifty though more than budget phones are sporting multiple rear cameras these days, information technology's still surprising when a sub-$300 telephone features many cameras, particularly when the iPhone SE and Pixel 3a continue to make exercise with one lens. Information technology's downright shocking when yous see that the TCL 10L has a four camera array fanned out in a horizontal line across its back.
Besides a 48-megapixel chief camera, TCL includes an 8MP ultra wide bending lens for times that you want to pull back to include more than surrounding details. TCL skips a telephoto lens on the 10L — a concession institute in a lot of budget phones — turning to a 2MP macro camera and 2MP depth paradigm sensor to complete its rear camera assortment. The former helps you become nice and shut to objects without a blurry photo existence the end result while the latter helps with the TCL 10L'southward portrait style.
The TCL 10L'southward camera setup is a lot like the triple lenses you lot go from the Moto Grand Ability, relieve for that depth image sensor which is the odd camera out on Motorola's phone. So it seemed like a fair competition to pit these $250 phones against one another to detect out how the TCL phone's output measured up.
The TCL 10L may pack more than megapixels into its main sensor than the 16MP camera on the Moto G Power, but TCL's puts too much of a dark cast over colorful front 1000 decorations that a neighbour of mine put upward. Yeah, I shot these on a dreary, rainy solar day, only the Moto Yard Power reproduced the vibrant rainbow of colors in brighter tones. That said, the pinwheel attached to the fence is pretty blurry in the Moto'due south shot, while the TCL 10L did a skilful job of contending with the breeze to produce a steady shot.
Moving inside, the TCL 10L continues to skew dark in this photo of a breakfast shot in a darkened corner of my kitchen. Hither, the colors are more realistic, though, and the x Fifty'due south shot strikes a adept residual between the nutrient on the plate and the tiki mugs in the background. The Moto G Power, trying to recoup for the lack of lighting, has given this picture a yellow cast, which overwhelms some of the details carved into the tiki mugs. You can see the pattern in the countertop of the TCL photo, simply that's lost in the overly bright sheen of the Moto G Power paradigm.
I went to the shores of the San Leandro Channel to test out the ultra wide angle lens on the TCL 10L. This reference photo, shot with the chief camera on both phones, again illustrates the different approaches to color. The TCL 10L'south shot is much darker, and then the wooden dock and boats on the lefthand side of the shot look muted. Fifty-fifty the Coast Baby-sit send in the background isn't as white every bit it appears in the Moto G Power shot. At least the TCL 10L's fondness for the night side manages to capture the foreboding sky over Oakland.
Busting out the wide-angle lens merely intensifies the problems with the TCL 10L's shot. Everything's nonetheless besides dark, only at present in that location'southward more than to darken — the green plants in the foreground, too as the boosted boats docked off to the left. Fifty-fifty the heaven, which was so striking in the standard shot, is now over-exposed. The Moto Thousand Power's wide-angle lens took a better shot, even with my index finger dipping into the upper left corner of the shot.
Neither telephone has an optical zoom, but I thought I'd focus in on a bird at 3x just to see how well the digital zoom looks on the TCL 10L. And it's dandy — the seagull remains in much sharper focus in the TCL shot. This is another instance where the Moto G Power'southward fondness for brighter colors gets it into trouble, as the TCL 10L has the more balanced photo.
I continue to be baffled as to why companies include macro lenses on their phones. It's not really a feature people accept been calling out for, and then far every bit I know, and the results routinely disappoint. Indeed, to become a usable comparison for the TCL 10L's macro lens, I had to take several shots of this rose until I found one that wasn't a hopeless blur. Even then, the macro shot taken by the Moto G Power is better focused and more richly colored. The pinkish rose in the TCL 10L's shot came out every bit more sickly orange.
Up until now, it's been difficult-sledding for the TCL 10L's camera array, but the depth sensor on the phone really helps out with portrait shots. The background blur in this portrait of my girl is more comprehensive in the TCL 10L's photo, though a wisp of her hair did get caught up in the effect, a problem the Moto Thou Power didn't have. I also call up the TCL phone did a better job separating my daughter from the background, though more expensive phones with amend sensors and more powerful neural engines would make her pop even more. More importantly, the TCL 10L gets her peel tone right, while she'due south too shiny and stake in the Moto shot.
Mayhap the TCL 10L is just improve at handling skin. I much prefer the selfie TCL's 16MP front camera shot, as it accurately picked up some of the ruddiness of my confront. The Moto Yard Power's shot is nigh as good in terms of pare tone, but it did blur my eyebrow.
Yous won't see this in any of the photos I took, but my TCL 10L review unit added a TCL watermark to the corner of every shot. For some reason, TCL has that watermark enabled by default, forcing yous to dig into the photographic camera settings to turn it off. TCL tells me that a future software update volition turn the watermark off by default. All the same, that would be the first setting I'd double-check if I got my hands on a TCL 10L.
TCL 10L review: Performance
If you're expecting powerful performance from a sub-$300 phone, you're shopping in the incorrect role of town. That said, the TCL 10L comes equipped with a Snapdragon 665 system-on-bit supported by 6GB of RAM. Forget about keeping pace with the iPhone SE 2020 and its form-leading A13 Bionic processor, but the TCL 10L will deliver solid performance that can handle most tasks a typical smartphone user can throw at it.
Apps launch at about the aforementioned speed on the TCL 10L as they do on the Moto G Power and Moto One thousand Stylus, which as well utilise the Snapdragon 665. I noticed the occasional hiccup playing games like PUBG Mobile and Asphalt 9, but those are very enervating games for a mobile device, and about the outer limit of what yous'd expect to run on the TCL 10L.
In terms of benchmarks, the TCL 10L turned in the kind of results nosotros'd expect from a phone with its processor and retentivity. In the Geekbench v test of general functioning, the TCL 10L's multicore score of ane,354 was just backside the Moto G Ability (ane,387) and Moto G Stylus (1,406). All of those phones posted amend numbers than the more expensive Pixel 3a, which has a Geekbench 5 score of 1,336.
The TCL 10L actually outperforms Motorola'due south latest phones in some graphics tests. On 3DMark's Sling Shot Farthermost OpenGL test, the TCL 10L posted a score of 1,782, simply ahead of the 1,756 outcome for the Moto G Stylus and well in front of the Moto G Ability and its one,704 tally. None of those phones match the Pixel 3a's ii,543 result.
Don't expect a lot of storage from the TCL 10L, which ships with 64GB of chapters. A microSD slot lets you add together another 256GB to the telephone. The Moto G Stylus doubles the on-board storage of TCL's phone, though.
TCL 10L review: Bombardment and charging
The TCL 10L isn't the longest-lasting phone in TCL'south new lineup, but it'southward not far off the pace ready by the TCL 10 Pro. That telephone, powered by a larger iv,500 mAh battery averaged 10 hours and 47 minutes on our custom battery test, in which nosotros have phones surf the spider web over LTE until they run out of ability. The TCL 10L, which has a 4,000 mAH battery, finished 48 minutes behind its counterpart, with a outcome of 9 hours, 59 minutes.
That'due south about an average result for a smartphone on our test, though the TCL 10L's performance was far behind comparably priced phones from Motorola. The Moto G Power currently offers the best telephone battery life we've seen from recent handsets, lasting more than sixteen hours on our test. While that phone is optimized to final a very long time, even the Moto Grand Stylus, which has the same sized battery as the TCL 10L, outperformed TCL's phone by more than than 2 hours on our bombardment test.
TCL didn't include a fast charging feature with the lower-cost TCL 10L, and our test results reflect that. After charging a drained TCL 10L for half-an-hour, the battery indicator was simply upwards to 27%. Contrast that with the TCL 10 Pro, which TCL says tin can get up to 50% charged after 35 minutes cheers to its Quick Accuse 3.0 support.
TCL 10L review: Software and special features
For a phone that'southward non tied to any carrier, there sure are a lot of unnecessary apps on the TCL 10L, with apps like Gallery, Video and Music duplicating the efforts of their preinstalled Google counterparts. Nxtvision gets its own app, as well, which is fair enough since that lets you fine tune the marquee feature on this phone. Only that same app is also accessible through the Settings app, which features redundant.
You'll also find a separate Smart Key app, which lets y'all customize ane of the more useful features included with the TCL 10L. In Smart Key, you tin can program the button on the left side of the phone to perform specific actions with single and double presses. (A long press of the button appears to exist reserved for Google Assistant; yous tin only toggle that feature on and off.) I reprogrammed the smart key on my TCL 10L to launch the camera with one press and turn the phone's flashlight on with two presses. It's a pretty convenient way to do some bones tasks without having to unlock the telephone.
Speaking of unlocking the telephone, TCL included a fingerprint sensor on the back of the TCL 10L, but below the telephone'due south camera array and simply above the company's logo. The sensor looks a little smaller than similar rear fingerprint readers on Moto's 1000 series phones, but I found it pretty easy to attain around and unlock the TCL 10L without brushing my finger against the camera assortment.
The TCL 10L runs Android 10, and TCL has committed to at least i major OS update after that — presumably Android xi, afterward it arrives afterwards this year. Beyond 2021, though, it's unclear if you lot'll be able to become newer versions of Android, though TCL likewise promises consequent security updates.
TCL 10L review: Verdict
Do you value a smartphone for its great display, or do other features similar photographic camera, battery and functioning conduct more weight with you? How you answer that question will go a long way to determining how you lot feel about the TCL 10L.
After all our testing for this TCL 10L review, it's articulate this upkeep phone has an outstanding screen, especially for a device that simply costs $250. If you mainly employ your phone to eat videos, play games and while abroad the hours on Instagram, the TCL 10L would exist a peachy phone to pick upwardly.
Other aspects of TCL's budget phone just don't impress, though. Information technology's not that the TCL's battery life or photographic camera performance is poor — though the dandy piece of work with colour the TCL 10L does with its display is not in evidence with its rear cameras — but that other similarly priced phones do those things better. Both the Moto G Power and Moto G Stylus terminal longer on a charge. The G Ability takes ameliorate pictures while the G Stylus includes a stylus for jotting down notes.
As good equally the TCL 10L's screen is — and information technology'south very, very proficient — it's hard to recommend this device over some of the other best cheap phones that smooth more in other areas.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/tcl-10-l
Posted by: rochagrealwas.blogspot.com
0 Response to "TCL 10L review"
Post a Comment