Monday, April 19, 2021

TCL 10 5G Review

TCL has a new contender in the 5G smartphone market with the TCL 10 5G. It’s a mid-range device priced at under PHP 18K, but you’ll get a 6.53-inch FHD+ display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 765, quad-rear cameras, and a 4,500mAh battery. With only a few 5G devices in the market under that price range, is this the one to get? Find out in our review.

Design and Construction

The TCL 10 5G features a large immersive screen at 6.53-inches with Full HD resolution. It’s a crisp screen with punchy colors. A hole punch is situated on the upper left for the 16MP selfie camera.

Placed above it is the earpiece, and up top is a secondary microphone and 3.5mm audio jack.

On the left is the textured smart key button for launching apps quickly, and the card tray for a single nano-SIM card and a microSD card.

On the right are the power button and volume rockers. The buttons are pretty much easy to reach, although the volume up button would sometimes require you to reposition your hand so you can press it.

Down below is the USB-C port, loudspeaker, and main microphone.

At the back, we have the quad-rear camera module in a single row flanked with two LED flashes. It consists of the 64MP main, 8MP ultra-wide, 5MP macro, and 2MP depth. Also found here is the fingerprint scanner.

The TCL 10 5G is a sleek-looking and premium device with a glass front and back, and an aluminum frame in the middle with a metallic paint job. It’s a pretty chunky device at 9.05mm and a bit hefty at 210g.

Display and Multimedia

The TCL 10 5G uses a 6.53-inch screen with Full HD resolution or 395ppi and IPS panel. It’s a beautiful display with HDR10 support, good contrast, and punchy colors. We even thought it’s AMOLED. It has Dark mode and has an option to hide the Dotch (front camera notch).

You can further enhance your viewing experience using the NXTVISION engine. From here you can toggle Image enhancement to automatically enhance image contrast, sharpness, and dark details, and Video & Game enhancement to enhance color, contrast, and depth of detail for HDR-quality viewing. You can also adjust color modes and temperature, activate reading and eye comfort modes or increase readability under sunlight.

When it comes to audio, the TCL 10 5G has a single down-firing speaker. Like most smartphones in this price range, the audio is loud and crisp, good enough for YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, or some gaming. But if you really want a good audio experience, you can opt for Bluetooth TWS earbuds or wired headphones.

Camera

The TCL 10 5G is equipped with quad-rear cameras consisting of a 64MP main, 8MP ultra-wide, 5MP macro, and 2MP depth. The configuration makes it a versatile shooter that can adapt to multiple scenarios. For selfies, it has a 16MP shooter. It features Portrait mode, SuperNight, Pro, Light Trace, High Pixel (full 64MP), Stop motion, Super macro, Slow-mo, and Panorama.

Image quality is excellent even for a smartphone of this price. The images have a great dynamic range, good contrast, sharp details, and rich colors. Portrait mode also works well in providing artificially blurred backgrounds on subjects. The Night mode was able to illuminate dark subjects, however, the details are muddy with overblown highlights. Selfies, on the other hand, are sharp with accurate colors and good portrait effect implementation.

When it comes to videos, you can record up to 4K resolution at 60 fps with EIS. Quality is also as good as the photographs, while the EIS also works well in stabilizing the footage.

OS, UI, and Apps

Handling the software is TCL UI 3.0 based on Android 11. It’s a clean, easy-to-navigate UI, with colorful icons, and uses multiple home screens to house apps.

Aside from the usual Google apps, it has TCL’s own apps like Smart Key, File Share, Optimize, Smart Manager, TCL+, and TCL Support Center. For third-party apps, it’s only Netflix and Facebook.

Storage-wise, we have 128GB, which is a decent capacity, but you can expand it via the dedicated microSD slot.

Performance and Benchmarks

Powering the device is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G with Adreno 620 GPU and 6GB of RAM. These are decent specs for a mid-ranger of this price and performed smoothly when it comes to the usual tasks like navigation, photography, and handling basic apps like social media and streaming. It’s powerful enough to run games like Asphalt 9, Call of Duty Mobile, and Genshin Impact, although the recommended graphics settings are low. Check out the benchmark scores below.

• AnTuTu V8 – 313,582
• 3D Mark – 1,687 (Wild Life), 3,291 (SSE – OpenGL ES 3.1)
• PC Mark – 8,061 (Work 2.0)
• Geekbench – 605 (Single-Core), 1,812 (Multi-Core), 1,258 (OpenCL)
• Androbench – 928.24 MB/s (Seq. Read), 211.34 MB/s (Seq. Write)

Connectivity and Battery Life

The TCL 10 5G pretty much covers almost everything we need for connectivity in a smartphone. It has 5G, WiFi ac, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, UBS-C, and satnavs. What’s missing is dual-SIM support, which is odd for an Android nowadays. This shouldn’t bother you unless you really need to use two SIM cards.

The TCL 10 5G is also equipped with a 4,500mAh battery. It’s enough to last us a whole day of mixed usage. PC Mark, however, rated it at a low 7 hours and 39 minutes, but in our video loop test which entails playing a 1080p video on loop in Airplane mode at 50% brightness and volume with headset plugged in, and we got a good 23 hours and 26 minutes of playback. Charging the battery takes almost 2 hours.

Conclusion

The TCL 10 5G is priced at PHP 17,990, which makes it one of the most affordable 5G-enabled smartphones in the country. It has a nice screen, great cameras, and long battery life. However, it faces tough competition in this price range as there are more powerful devices under PHP 20K that also have 5G. Not to mention dual-SIM capable. Still, it’s a welcome addition to the growing list of affordable 5G smartphones.

TCL 10 5G specs:
6.53-inch FHD+ (1080 x 2340) Dotch display
HDR10, 395PPI, Dedicated display engine w/ NXTVISION tech
Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G CPU
Adreno 620 GPU
6GB RAM
128GB storage
microSD card up to 1TB (dedicated slot)
Quad rear cameras:
• 64MP F1.89 (main)
• 8MP F2.2 (ultra-wide)
• 5MP F2.2 (macro)
• 2MP F2.4 (depth)
16MP F2.2 front camera
Single SIM
5G, 4G LTE
WiFi 802.11 ac, 2×2 MIMO
Bluetooth 5.0
NFC
GPS, A-GPS, BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, QSS
Rear-mounted fingerprint scanner
USB Type-C
3.5mm audio jack
4,500mAh battery w/ 18W Quick Charge 3.0 support
163.65 x 76.56 x 9.05mm
210g
Chrome Blue, Mercury Gray