Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “TCL 20 Pro 5G – Best phone under $500?”.
Thanks to tcl for sponsoring this video, if someone sat me down five years ago and said john, you will sell a website. Your beard will get much grayer and you’ll be able to buy a smartphone with a 6.67 inch amoled display a 48 megapixel quad camera setup and a beastly 4500 milliamp hour battery and something new called 5g for under 500 bucks. I would have called them crazy. That is actually what you get with the tcl20 pro 5g.
You get a lot of awesome, it’s not a perfect package, but it’s one. That’S really good, and it’s certainly compelling for the price and before i get into the video we’re actually going to give one of these phones away. One of the two that i have here so stay tuned to the end and i’ll tell you guys how to enter to win.
So tcl made a huge splash last year, putting their own brand name on phones, they’ve been making phones for a really long time. With last year’s 10 pro, i think they showed how a company can sort of merge, bringing sort of quality and mid-range to the market, and those two things don’t have to be separate. I think, luckily, for consumers buying a great phone now is really not hard to do. I mean you have to look extra hard. I think, to find a bad phone. Everything is some version of good.
There are a few things that the tcl is doing. I think that’s setting it apart from the competition things that they are kind of uniquely qualified to do and bring, and i think obviously that starts with the display right. I’M guessing that, like 70 of you watching this video have a tcl tv somewhere in your house or know somebody who does i own three of them.
I bought one for my parents, it’s usually sort of the go-to tv uh i like roku. I like good displays. I don’t like spending a ton of money, uh tcl televisions and displays so check all of those boxes.
So you take a company that makes your own display technology and now starts making phones. You can start to see how the vertical integration could help the consumers. I said it for years and i’ll die on this hill, that the display is the most important part of the phone. I don’t care what the specs are.
If the display is bad, that’s how you do and interact with everything that phone can do so. Uh 20. Pro it’s rocking a pretty nice 6.67 inch amoled panel. That is obviously surprise made by tcl uh it’s tuned and calibrated the way that they wanted. That display to be – and i think the expertise shows here with that and i can go on and tell you like how the screen is bright and colors. Pop and blacks are black and all that is certainly true. But i think the most important thing that i take away from the screen is that i didn’t notice a real difference between this and a thousand to twelve hundred dollar display. That is, a giant complement to tcl.
This display holds its own on the market, even in the flagship space. Now there are some caveats there. It’S not perfect, there’s some cuts that i think had to be made to get it to that. Like 500 price point, so first, it’s fhd plus, so you aren’t getting the highest resolution out there, also no high refresh rate stuck at 60 hertz. Because of that price, though, i think that those cuts do make sense and if you take a flagship phone, that’s at fhg at similar resolution uh, i think you’d be hard-pressed to see a giant difference between what tcl is doing and said flagship and as much as I love high refresh rate screens and i say it in almost every video in a phone that costs 500.
I understand why it’s not there now. Would i want it there absolutely, but at least i get it. Tcl is also using what they’re calling next division 2.0 and i don’t know why they didn’t put an e in next, but it’s nxt, and basically this is their calibration for the display, like everything nowadays uh it’s going to use ai to enhance what you are looking At so it can change the color and contrast, depending on kind of what you’re showing supports hdr10 and also can convert sdr to hdr. I think one of the most interesting things this phone that i hadn’t seen before um, is its true flesh technology kind of a weird name, but hear me out basically make sure the skin tones the people on screen look accurate uh, and this leads to an overall Really great display experience, which i think i would expect from tcl when you hear sort of flesh display technology.
The first thing that came to my mind, was like skin smoothing from samsung and how it looks very, very unnatural. This just makes your skin tone on the camera. Look actually how your skin tone looks in real life.
It doesn’t do any weird like strange, filtery, looking stuff uh. It just makes the image, i think, look more true to life, so i give tcl credit for that. All right, so, aside from the display, i think the other things that important to me is the look and feel of the phone uh and the cameras. So i like the design changes they made this year, it’s made of glass on the front and the back with a nice curve to it.
I don’t love using waterfall displays they look good. My finger tends to hit the side quite a bit. It’S a personal choice. Here, if i could choose, i would choose not waterfall, but it does look good. So bear that in mind. If you’re looking to pick one up, perhaps my favorite thing, uh the glass on the back – has a matte finish so less fingerprints, and this is going to sound crazy, but the camera system, which is vertical, there’s no camera bump, i’m just going to slow clap for No camera bump um.
I didn’t realize how much i missed phones that were flat on the back the back of this phone. If you just look at it – and i was like how much this phone costs, i think most people would be like 900 bucks – a thousand dollars, this phone feels premium uh, which is again a huge credit to tcl. So i think, if there’s one sore spot with a lot of mid-range phones, it’s going to be the camera system. That is where a lot of the cuts are made to get to the price.
So i’m not going to say that this is the best camera system ever and that it’s going to out shoot flagships from apple and samsung and google – it’s not at that level. But again you have to bring it back to the price and for 500 you are getting four cameras on the back even two years ago. That was a hard thing to imagine and i think tcl is making a big effort to make sure that camera’s system is at least as good as it can be all right, so main sensor, maybe a little technical. It’S a 48 megapixel sony imx 582 with oice.
It’S optical image stabilization. I like saying oysters instead of ois, it’s fun, try it voice um in fact the same sensor that actually is in the oneplus 8. That’S a camera! I really liked, and so here it’s honestly a relatively similar experience. So here’s some like examples.
So you can kind of see that the blues are shifting to like magenta in the photos. Auto white balance in video was sometimes good, sometimes not so good. It was inconsistent uh, it didn’t handle, highlights that well in video or photo in comparison to like flagships, and you can see those comparisons here. You know what they look like and again look at these comparisons here and keep the price in mind.
One is five hundred dollars. One goes up to almost twelve hundred dollars. Plus you are still getting a really good camera system. I was actually impressed with video stabilization mode um. It did a pretty nice job. Eis uh is on by default. It can also turn on like a super anti-shake mode which changes the settings to 1080p 30fps, but it did a really nice job um.
So aside from the main camera, it’s got a 16 megapixel wide angle, a 5 megapixel macro camera, which i don’t use that much. But if macro is your jam, it’s there. It also has a depth camera.
So you have a ton of range with this phone. I think one of the best things that i can say about the phone and for the really the first time in a while the phone’s at this price is you don’t have to worry about the camera any photo you take is going to be some version of Good – and that is an awesome place to be and really kind of now, through the middle end of 2021. It’S one of the first times that you can actually say that all right, so those features aside differentiates the phone, i think is the little like the little things that make it unique and the 20 pro packs a lot of those. I call them intangibles all right. So it’s rocking the snapdragon 750 g, a tried and true processor with six gigs of ram. This is a place where tcl was able to save some money.
We’Ve seen competitors sort of up the ram to eight, but honestly, i’m fine with it, because the processor ran extremely well now. The headroom for future years might be a problem with the six gigabytes of ram, but at least like right now it ran crazy. Smooth games were fast multitasking, with no problems uh at all and for most tasks that i was doing on it like social media browsing. The web you’d be hard pressed to notice any difference between this and the flagship chips – the snapdragon 888, for example, and even more i’m glad that tcl is using the qualcomm chip in these phones.
There are ton of manufacturers looking to create even cheaper alternatives, and i think there you see a sacrifice in speed and quality 750g. It’S, i think, a pretty good middle ground for this phone and the chip. We see a lot of competitors in this mid-range price. Go to because it offers a really nice combination of performance and value, but that performance aside, it also packs features that i care about beast mode battery that you can charge with wireless charging or quick charge. So wireless charging is actually new for this year. Uh in display fingerprinter as well, which surprise actually works and works really well, which is awesome to see, make its way to a 500 phone. Also, if you care and a lot of you do, there’s a 3.5 millimeter headset jack and a micro sd card slot. Making this one of the last phones to have those and if you care about those features you’re getting both of them from tcl, there’s also a programmable smart key, which is insanely programmable. You can program do anything from a single press to a double press. A ton of activity is tcl is kind of letting you do with it.
What you want, which is nice to have, of course, you’re also getting 5g, it’s in the name, android 11., so also you’re, going to get two years of os upgrades. In addition to two years of security updates, so i think the big question is: who is this phone for and that’s a really personal choice? This phone is for you, first of all, if you want a 3.5 millimeter, headset jack and a micro sd card, and don’t want to spend crazy amount of money. But if you want to compromise a really good display good enough camera that you don’t have to worry about it and a really solid, build quality, this might be the phone to look at alright, so tcl sent us two phones. We don’t need two phones here, so i want to give someone a chance to win.
One super easy just give the video a thumbs up and leave a comment why you would want the phone, but in that comment, leave a social handle, so he can contact you if you win we’ll put an example on screen and get all the information will be In the description .