Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “the WOW phone!”.
Thanks the TCL for sponsoring this video, I think when I hear tuna, fifty dollar phone – and maybe you there are some preconceived notions for what you are going to get. You know you might think you’re gon na get a bad screen, a sluggish processor, not enough RAM and overall just a really bad experience, and maybe us in the tech community are doing a disservice to the audience by kind of making the $ 500 be the threshold For budget there’s a lot of devices that come in well below that and they’re claiming to offer really good performance, so we wanted to test that. So with that in mind, I really wanted to see you what 250 bucks gets you for a new phone. So this is the TCL 10l. It’S the little brother to the phone we cover in a previous video, the TCL 10 pro the TCL name, you probably associate with TVs, baby-making phones for a long time.
They were the ones that are behind the Alcatel brand. They made modern blackberries and the new generation of palm phones say making phones for a while they’re starting to put their actual name on them. So for 20, 50 bucks you’re getting a pretty full-featured phone from a reputable company. You’D be able to buy this at most big-box retailers.
Software is obviously important. It’S running the latest version of Android you’re, getting four cameras on the back, so it’s got a lot of features that you look for in a phone, but for 250 bucks. How good can that really be? So, I think a big category, and maybe a big area of concern with 20 $ 50 phone is going to be performance, so this performance is a combination of the snapdragon 665 and a very generous serving of ram with six gigabytes. In the TCL 10 l, so the combination of those two actually leads to a really smooth experience, and by that I mean multitasking without any issue, chrome tabs open playing back HD video.
All no problem you’d expect that right, that’s like a barrier to entry to just a phone being usable. We also wanted to test gaming right, so we started with some lower intensive games, see how that perform things like candy crush, and unsurprisingly, there was no issue. So we ratcheted up a little bit more to test some of the most intense games you can get on mobile.
So we tested pub G and Call of Duty. We couldn’t change the settings, so it defaulted to kind of medium and that’s where we left it, but performance was, you would go to. It was smooth 1 % playable no issues, so that was very nice area of surprise.
Now, don’t mistake this for a snapdragon 865. What you’re, getting with the 665 is still a capable processor in that 6 gigs of ram, I think, is so smart TCL to add in here it makes everything run extra, smooth, it’s a giant safety net and I think you really start to see it when you Play those intensive games, I noticed no issues at all. If somebody handed me his phone and said what processor using, I could not tell you that is running a 665 or something much more powerful on paper, and I think, since it can handle game, make it handle anything else that you want to throw at. It photo editing even video editing if you want to try that on your phone, all of your social media, stuff, web browsing and video playback, you won’t have any issue, so that goes hand-in-hand with software.
It’S running Android 10 at the TCL software UI. On top of it – and it’s not a very heavy scan, it kind of augments with Android already does and is there and overall was a pretty nice experience using the phone was smooth. The one area of concern with some of these budget or the lower cost phones, is that the software you get is pretty much the software you’re going to have for the duration of the phone TCL says: you’ll get at least one major OS update and then buying Monthly security patches for at least two years – that’s one you can save for a lot of other phones, so it does seem wild to see a $ 250 phone with four cameras on the back dual LED flash and then another camera on the front. So five sensors that do essentially different things and how good can all those cameras be oftentimes? One really good sensor can outperform. You know a bunch of mediocre ones. So your main shooter is a 48 megapixel.
You’Ve got a two megapixel depth sensor: a two megapixel macro: camera 8 megapixel super wide angle, camera and you can shoot 4k video at 30 frames per second. So I think cameras is one area where you need to make perhaps change your expectations for what you’re going to get now. The photos that you are going to pull out of here do generally look good, they’re way higher contrasts than I’m used to seeing I mean the colors on the screen that are reproduced. Don’T necessarily look like the colors that you’ll see in real life.
Take a picture of a beautiful green tree, they will be reproduced on the phone as kind of neon green. So if you like, that bright, contrasting picture and a lot of people do you’re, probably really gon na, like the photos that come out of the 10 L, you also get some cool features too. Like that macro lens, we can get real close and I don’t actually use that in the real world, but it was fun to play with in front of tests and the pictures that came out of it again looked pretty decent.
So, on the video side, it’s a very similar story. I really like that it does 4k 30, but if you’re taking video in a little light, you end up with a ton of noise images now you’re not gon na get a world beater camera. Here I mean you’re, not gon na get a a hundred score on DxO mark you’re, not gon na beat sort of flagged your phone’s here. These are good, but certainly not great cameras. If your expectations with the 10l are to take photos and video that you can capture memories and share on social media, you will be very pleasantly surprised and happy with what you get.
If your expectations are that you can take incredible photos in low light and that no matter what situation you’re taking photos in they’re going to look amazing, then perhaps you might be disappointed. I think this is a matter of adjusting what you expect from your phone. If you do, that, you’ll be pretty happy, so display is one of the most important areas to me of a phone. This is one of the things that I was most worried about when I started looking and testing a $ 202 phone, so it’s made by TCL company, that’s very well known, respected for making good television displays, and I was really happy to see that that acumen made Its way over to the 10 L, it is a very good LCD display. They call it a dot display. It’S a six point.
Five three inch display and it’s fhd plus and looking at it. You would think it’s a high-end phone or the high-end display. It’S got a 91 % screen to body ratio, so obviously bezels are incredibly small color reproduction is really good too. You know it’s LCD should get really bright.
Vibrant colors, the blacks are still plenty black now, but certainly not OLED quality, but they are very good. So all that might be due to TCL’s next vision, that’s kind of what they’re calling their suite of tech that optimizes colors. It makes things generally look brighter and more vibrant and it’s on full display with the 10 L. So aside from making you know the things on the screen, you look better.
The next vision is also going to kind of up convert SDR footage to HDR. This is one area where I think the phone absolutely outshines. Anyone else not two and $ 50 price point. This is an incredible display and you can see TCL kind of flexing they’re displaying muscles here with the 10 L that sort of good quality transferred over to the rest of the phone. So from a built standpoint, it is a plastic phone and it feels light in the hand. But it’s not to say it’s got a small battery.
It’S got a four thousand milliamp hours. So when you take that kind of large storage size with the power efficiency at a snapdragon 665 and an LCD display, you’ve got a recipe for really nice fabulous. So one thing I really do like is a fully customizable smart key on the side, so you could set it to open camera with one tap or open the camera, with a double tap or open Chrome with a single tap, you can customize what it can do And how you interact with the phone? I really liked having that, and I wish more phones had a customizable key. It just made the phone feel more personal to me, and also here is a headphone jack.
You’Ve got a fingerprint reader on the back, which was fast, efficient and really worked well, some things that you were missing that you might get on more expensive, mid-range or top-tier phones. An official IP rating would certainly be among them. Wireless charging would be among those things as well that are not here. Also, TCL is not really skimping on storage, so starting storage is 64 gigs.
You could up it to 128. We also have expandable storage via micro, sd available in two colors. You’Ve got this blue and an arctic white, so Spota obviously offers a lot to be able to buy this at most big-box retailers. So you know Amazon online Best Buy Walmart tons of other places where phones will be sold, but it sounds like something that you want to pick up or you want to check out for yourself.
We link to it down below. So that’s the TCL, 10 l and overall you’re getting a really good phone that does pretty much everything some version of good and I think, phones that come in at 250. Bucks offer interesting, perhaps alternative to folks that are buying this $ 500 mid to your phones. If you’re gon na spend that $ 500 and get a new phone over 2 years, perhaps you’re better off spending $ 250 and getting a new phone every year.
Since the movement on how much better those 2 and $ 50 phones seem to get seems drastically improved. Year-Over-Year, so if you’re the kind of person that wants to get something new, but it’s also budget conscious and wants to keep what you have might be worth considering something like the TCL 10 L, it’s a really good feeling, Diezel a performing phone. That gives you a lot of performance and a lot of options for really affordable price. .