Review: TCL 10 Pro

By Canadian Reviewer Staff

TCL may not be the first company to come to mind when it comes to flagship smartphones. This is the world’s number two television maker after all and has built a name for itself in making premium screen technology widely available.  

What most people don’t know is that TCL has been in the smartphone game for some time. It was a licensee of brands like Alcatel, Palm, and BlackBerry. TCL was behind the resurgent KeyOne and Key2 models, the very last smartphones that featured QWERTY keyboards.  

The TCL 10 Pro comes as a complete surprise in a year where many of us are in dire need of good news. For the price of a base iPhone SE 2, the TCL 10 Pro offers an impressive and crisp 6.47” FHD curved AMOLED display the likes that we’ve only seen on flagship Samsung phones. This TCL 10 Pro has a four camera array with up to 64MP ultra-high resolution photo capability, plus standalone  macro, super-wide angle, and low-light cameras as well as a 24 megapixel front facing camera. It also features an in-display fingerprint sensor and face unlock, something that some other flagship smartphones don’t even have yet. 

Consider a fast-charging 4500 man battery with OTG reverse charging and a decent Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 Octa-core processor with 6GB of RAM and 128 GB of onboard storage, and it looks like TCL has hit the sweet spot in terms of features given its  $700 CAD  (Bell) and 665 CAD (Telus) pricing. 

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How To Make the Most of Extra Screen Time

These days, it goes almost without saying that anyone with a smartphone spends quite a bit of time on it. Smartphones have become nearly everyone's go-to way to kill extra downtime at work or make that time spent waiting in line at their favorite coffee shop a little less boring. That said, whether you use yours mostly for communicating with family and friends or keeping up with the daily news, you probably spend over three hours every day on your phone. However, you can only waste so many hours playing Angry Birds before you're chomping at the bit for something more enriching to try. The following options are some great ideas for making more of your smartphone screen time.

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Samsung is developing 1TB storage chips for smartphones

Looks like we’re one step closer to getting phones with 1TB storage capacities. Samsung has just announced it’s going to begin offering the first 1TB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) solution for smartphones, allowing 1TB of storage in a single flash memory chip. Mass production of the new storage chips are already on its way. It has the same package size as Samsung’s 512GB unit but has read speeds of up to 1,000 megabytes a second, which Samsung says is 10 times the speed of a typical microSD card. Right now, Samsung’s option of bringing 1TB storage into a phone was with the Galaxy Note9 support a 512GB microSD card, which can be used alongside the 512GB model. With this new chip though, users will have 1TB onboard already. Some are speculating this could make its way into the rumoured high-end model of the S10, which is said to also have 12GB of RAM.

Source: The Verge

Photos show Apple’s influence over Android phone design

Whether you have strong feelings for or against Apple, you can’t deny the influence the Cupertino-based tech giant has on the smartphone industry. This collection of photos shared by Reddit user u/Saim_Ray010 shows the shift in smartphone design before and after Apple released the original iPhone as well as before and after the iPhone X. You can see the lack of a coherent design language from brands before Apple put out its first phone as well as how many notched Android phones showed up after Apple popularized the notch. Some will argue that Apple wasn’t the first—with Sharp and Essential beating the company to the punch. But the brand certainly exercises a bigger influence on the industry as these images prove.