my expectations going into this one we're pretty low I mean the way that I
know TCL is as that budget TV brand that
managed to sell so many budget TVs that they got a big enough R&D budget to
start making like actually really good
TVs so I expected kind of a similar paradigm these things would be good
enough as long as you only have you know a couple hundred bucks to spend on a
phone but it's gonna take them five years to make anything decent and then I
saw the reviewers guide and I'm not talking like the flashy marketing terms
and the reviewers guide they call it what do they call this thing a Dodge
display which basically just means it has a whole bunch get it it's a dot not
dot I'm talking the level of
transparency and evidently thought that
has gone into seemingly every aspect of
these phones I mean there is a level of maturity in at least the feature set
anyway that I would have expected from a phone manufacturer that's been doing
this for five years not just a couple
okay so you got a sim removal tool and some other stuff including oh look at
that they've got a case display greatness wow that is that is attacking
USB type-c cable and wall wart is this a
decent wall wart or is it like a budget one five volt to em so this would be a
low-speed wall wart with the ten L it's how look at what we got with the pro got
the phone itself got basically the exact same thing here but this one better not
have that display greatness nonsense on it does I mean I can see why they want
to wear that on their sleeves well really on your sleeve because that's
their focus they're going okay hey where's our credibility in the phone
market you make good TV so then like those have screens so phones also have
screens so that should work out great for everyone right will see us PC cable
it's good everything should have us pc charging and a there it is nine volt two
amps so this one can apparently take the 10 pro from zero to 50 percent battery
and about half an hour I mean it's pretty standard fare these days but it's
nice to see on you know affordable offerings I guess interestingly the 10 L
comes with a protector while the ten pro does not
probably because the ten pro has this
kind of sexy two and a half D glass that
we first saw on the Samsung Galaxy s8 and that I still like basically like an
SI plus clone really if you want to
compare it directly to anything and then
for this this feels quite a lot more budget like even the back doesn't have
that same sort of slickness to the to
the glass both of them have quad camera
setups though which I thought was pretty interesting now whether or not you
actually get any decent results out of them that remains to be seen but both of
them have quad cameras had dual flashes on them that's firing them up
immediately the difference in display technology between these two is stark
and not just the difference in display technology but the difference in display
calibration the LCD one is clearly more
purple while the OLED on the pro is more
like what I would expect from this you know hi there Android startup page this
does not actually bode well for a company that is supposed to be a display
specialist and there is a lot of color shift and brightness loss when you're
viewing the 10l from off axis this is definitely a budget display compared to
well at least to the pro anyway there's a green cast to the pro two which is
interesting I mean let's get into the display settings cuz you never know they
might have some goofy like high vibrancy mode on by default or something dumb
like that who the haptic feedback is not great on this one that's something I
would turn off immediately we're in an age where a good haptic feedback is
something that I expect and this is very several generations ago the pro is quite
a bit better though oh good updates out of the box my favorite I guess updates
this better than no updates that's something that would really gave me pause going into one of these especially
at a higher price they've committed to Android 10 and 11 but there's no
commitment past 11 and that is really
the big issue with budget Android handsets is that yeah you're paying half
the price compared to an iPhone but you're also getting half as long to use
it compared to an iPhone when you talk the software support side of things
that's something that I'd really like to see if you want to break out as a phone
brand it's like these guys have done a great job of you know good messaging and
good features and just amazing transparency they get right into all the
chips that they're using all the sensors that they're using so this one right
here is a Snapdragon 675 pretty low end
for something with a pro moniker on it at this point in time but for most
people I would make the argument that it's actually kind of fast enough as
long as everything else is up to snuff it's got six gigs of RAM on the pro
model 128 gigs of storage microSD
expansion which is really nice to see no 5g but it does have 4G and it's got a
headphone jack and is that no way is that an IR blaster hold on a second your
software is compatible with an IR blaster dang so you can use this thing
as a universal remote that's a feature that I really wish like still existed
the other top-level features are a 4500 milliamp hour battery
64 megapixel main shooter and yes an
under screen fingerprint sensor moving
over to the L it definitely lacks some of the cutting-edge features of the pro
so it's got a rear fingerprint sensor that's a 48 megapixel main shooter
amongst a generally less capable camera
loadout it's actually got a Snapdragon 6:65 rather than a 675 so this isn't
even like a flagship mid-range processor
and while it does still have six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage a SIM slot
and microSD slot and a headphone jack one of the biggest compromises is as
I've alluded to already the screen so where the pro has an OLED this one uses
an LCD that really has not impressed me so far interestingly TCL has you use
your dominant hand to choose which side the back button is on I do prefer I'm
right-handed and I do prefer the back button on my right we can see what next
vision versus not next vision looks like I can already tell I don't like it it's
like a contrast sharpness saturation enhancement oh one thing I didn't
mention is that the 10l has a four thousand milliamp hour battery compared
to the ten pros 4,500 million power battery enough of what's different
about them let's talk things in common again so they both do have that cool
multi Bluetooth feature that I mentioned before and they've also both got this
which is what they call their smart button so you can press once for some
action press twice for some other more different action and press and hold for
a third action this is basically what the big speed button should have been in
the first place so let's see what they're configured to by default oh look
at that they just let you set it up oh cool so
you can launch different camera modes that's pretty sweet
this could be better would be nice if you could just open any app you want
open a feature go open it up Hey look at that very nice I like it I'm not a huge fan
of buttons that oppose other buttons just because it's kind of easy to
accidentally mash them I mean the good news is you can at least just disable if
you don't like it naturally the good old classic rear fingerprint scanner is
faster so you'll actually quick draw this one faster than you can quick-draw
the pro let's have a look at how we're doing in terms of bloatware so you've got Netflix you've got they're
optimized which is something that you can configure your smart button to do is
just kind of close all your background tasks at once Facebook Netflix just like
the usual Google Apps actually not that much garbage on here wait radio don't
tell me this has an FM tuner shut up connect the headset it functions as a
radio antenna oh okay yeah okay well hey that's better than
like not having a headphone jack and not having a radio antenna I guess overall
this is looking pretty stock Android AF here right now visual enhancement screen
color okay we're in vivid vivid I want I want standard give me that standard
police dang they got a system-wide dark
mode very nice hi kitty this is a nice feature you usually see this on Chinese phones and
it's making its way over to other ones as well app cloner so you can have multiple instances of some apps
including Facebook Messenger or snapchat like plus your messaging apps this where
it might be useful to have multiple accounts signed in at once curiously
this appears to be a 64 gig phone when I
think my documentation says 128 gates so
the L might be up to 101 gig there yes it is hi sweetheart
it automatically recognized that this is in fact a cat and switched over to cat
mode wow that is a really loud shutter
sound okay volume buttons act as a shutter oh hi what a pretty picture
that's a lot better than I expected to be perfectly honest with you I need to
turn off that stupid watermark that's for sure but oh that's kind of cool
you can see previews in their camera app of what all the different lenses will
look like original ultra wide low light video so that's a really low resolution
sensor but designed for very poor lighting conditions interesting both of
them are using pixel binning by default so 16 megapixels here and 12 megapixels
here down from 64 and 48 if you have very good light you might want to switch
up to the high pixel mode but probably a good call for doing right now hey kitty
cat can you come back so I can get a quick video sample hi oh hi there
both of them have a shutter button that you can press while you are recording
video that's a feature that I actually use a lot just because you know you're
you know recording everyone singing happy birthday but you're never gonna
actually watch the video again you just want the picture so that way you kind of cover your bases for both of them hey
stabilization seems reasonable and autofocus is actually not bad let's see
if we what happens if we switch lenses so we'll try it on the 10 L so they both
go to 2x but you get an additional slider on the 10 Pro let's find
something far away so there's the 10 L we've got the 2 X + 1 X I'll actually
you get this nice slider on the 10 L as well so you can go all the way to 10 X
but like that's obviously not usable let's try the same exercise on the 10
Pro okay 1 X 2 X let's slide it all the
way to 10 X it's better definitely not amazing definitely better
I was expecting the cameras to be immediately and obviously awful that's
usually a big differentiator for budget films especially from inexperienced
brands but I would say there they're gonna be usable like man if I'm like
selfing like that ooh there's a lot of beauty smoothing going on ok hold on a
second front-facing camera does 1080p video though so that's that's nice okay so
let's let's try a picture without face beauty hey look at that even without
face beauty I'm still beautiful that is not a very sharp camera interesting I
had wanted to use a movie that I know well on Netflix to judge the display on
this thing and unfortunately it prompts you to update your Netflix app and then
when you update it it says it's no longer compatible with this device
contact the developers of your device growing pains I guess but that is one of
the things that can come with buying a phone from a brand that just doesn't
have that experience I don't know what the hey let's just throw Avengers on
here Oh TCL you done sinned mono speaker
on the pro it has our max brightness they claim it's in the neighborhood of
600 nits and is Netflix HD are 10
certified it does appear that HDR ten is working it looks alright
definitely a little bit of clipping in the highlights on the reflection on the floor there dad's it's pretty good and
the HDR is definitely working it's amazing how good like a mid-range phone
processor performs these days like you know I'm just casually browsing lct
store calm I got my movie running in the background it's like I don't take this
for granted you know like I had a blackberry summary time then on the 10 L
there's a pre-loaded app Netflix that doesn't launch on the phone due to a
compatibility issue I have to hope they're gonna sort that out but it does
give me some hesitation when it comes to what the software supports gonna look
like if these guys want to stand out I think saying hey we're gonna do Android
11 and 12 might be a really good way to do that other than that they are looking
pretty darn good for value phones after
the little bit of tweaking that I had to do on the 10 Pro to make the display not
look like dogs garbage mono speakers
that's a drag for me because I mean the
earpiece speaker is there all you had to do was amplify it but the fact that
there's a headphone jack as well as microSD expansion means that these are
looking pretty competitive and the cameras better than I expected for sure
not that I have you know rigorously benchmarked it the one thing I've saved
for myself till the end is the actual price I know that their value phones but
I don't know the exact pricing so I'm opening that up now
and the 10 Pro is gonna be 449 us that's
looking pretty compelling 8 it now let's have a look at the 10 L 249 Wow you can
sure get a lot of phone for 250 bucks now if the software only lasts for a
year or two being up to date this ad half the price of an iPhone is less
compelling to me than if you get 2 years out of this for 250 bucks not bad
overall build quality definitely not as
premium but no obvious snappiness issues
and that is a WoW that is a lot of phone for 250 bucks so thanks for watching
ShortCircuit this has been the TCL 10 Pro and 10 le make sure you get
subscribed and all that good stuff see you in the next one