LG may have exited the smartphone market, but two Chinese manufacturers, OnePlus and TCL, are swooping in with stylish and reasonably priced phones in nearly every price range. The TCL 20 Pro 5G is one of the best-looking smartphones we’ve seen in a long time, and it does pretty much everything a phone should do for half the price of some comparable models. The TCL 20 Pro 5G has a fairly large body, so some may struggle to reach the side buttons, but we didn’t.
However, the display’s edges are curved, making the phone very comfortable to hold. The phone has a USB-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a power button and volume rocker on the right edge, and a custom button on the left. You can customize what happens when this button is pressed, double-tapped, or held, and we found it extremely useful to map common functions to it. The phone’s back looks great, with its turquoise glass shell glinting in the light.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]There’s also a gray version of the phone, but we can’t comment on how it looks; photos don’t really show it off, so it’s something you really have to see to understand. Unlike many smartphones with camera bumps, the TCL 20 Pro 5G’s lenses are flush with the back of the phone, which contributes to the phone’s smooth feel. It weighs 190g and measures 9mm thick, so it has a fairly standard build size, but the absence of a camera bump makes the handset feel more slender.
The TCL 20 Pro 5G has a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen with a cut-out in the top-center for the front-facing camera. As previously stated, the display’s edges are curved, which is a fairly premium feature for a phone of this price, though not for everyone. The resolution is FHD+, but the refresh rate is only 60Hz, which may disappoint some users given that even low-cost phones in 2021 can get 120Hz. Some people, however, are unconcerned about screen refresh rate, which is likely what TCL is banking on.
We thought the screen was quite nice, as AMOLED technology lends itself to vibrant colors and high contrast, but the icing on the cake is TCL’s NXTVISION technology, which was borrowed from its TVs. This digitally upscales content, making games and videos look HDR and improving the appearance of images viewed. The in-screen fingerprint scanner isn’t guaranteed at this price point, but we found it to be generally easy to use. While you might not notice the difference if you pick up the TCL phone, you can see the improvements when comparing titles side by side with another handset.