TCL isn’t a huge name in smartphones, and you probably know it more for its TVs and soundbars, but in the last few years, it’s made a bigger push into the mobile market. The TCL 20 Pro 5G is the best phone in its family. It is part of the second generation of phones made by TCL since it started putting its own name on them. This phone came out at the same time as the TCL 20L and 20L Plus and right after the 20 SE and 20 5G. It’s probably the best phone TCL has made under its own name, but it doesn’t have much competition.
Most good mid-range phones have high-end specs, but they cut corners somewhere else, usually in the design department. For example, we often see powerful phones with ugly bodies or great camera phones with plastic shells that feel cheap. The 20 Pro 5G looks very high-end because of its curved 6.67-inch 1080p OLED screen with thin bezels.
You won’t find another screen like it in this class. It has a standard refresh rate of 60Hz, which goes against the trend of faster displays at 90Hz and 120Hz, so you won’t get that smooth-scrolling goodness here. And, thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be as sensitive to accidental touches on the curved sides as the last one did.
TCL has added its second-generation Nxtvision 2 technology, which is meant to make standard images and videos look more like high dynamic range content, with darker blacks and brighter whites. You can choose from a few different profiles, with “vivid” being the default, or turn it off completely. The 20 Pro 5G is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G mobile platform and 6GB of RAM. It has 256GB of storage, of which about 242GB are usable right away. With a microSD card, you can add up to 1 TB more storage space if you need it.
The 4,500mAh battery is pretty standard for a phone this size, and TCL says you won’t need to charge it during the day. In our battery test, we streamed HD video over Wi-Fi at full brightness for 11 hours and 28 minutes before the 20 Pro 5G shut off. Most people should be able to go a whole day without charging, but if they do, the 20 Pro 5G supports both Quick Charge 3.0 and wireless charging.
Most of the things the TCL 20 Pro 5G does wrong are things it doesn’t do. You’ll have to wait forever to charge the phone because it doesn’t have fast charging. Even though there are a lot of 120Hz phones out there, the display is only 60Hz, which might turn off potential buyers.