TCL Stylus 5G Review: Budget SPen Smartphone

This is like a 270 ish dollar phone and it has a built in pen or stylus as they call it or you might be used to be calling it an s pen with what samsung has, but ultimately, ive done. A video and ill link. The video down below, where i show you basically everything that you can do with the s pen, so i go really in depth with that video and this phone itself works on t, mobile and metro. So if you have one of those carriers or youre with one of those carriers, you can use this phone on there, which ends up being great because its so inexpensive and its a pretty darn good phone for the price. Now let me just run through some specs on here: 6.81 inch. 60 hertz 1080p plus resolution display 500 nits brightness. So what does that mean? Basically, the screen is definitely clear enough to see it looks really good and 500 its brightness is. It gets actually pretty bright, especially for when you think of this 270 dollar phone. It looks just as good as a lot of other phones that ive seen a lot more expensive than this, like at the 5 600 range. It looks just as good as those, if not better than that, so im very, very happy with the look and brightness of the display i do wish it was 120 hertz im so used to 120 hertz that this does feel a little bit slow the display, but Ultimately, if youve never seen 120 hertz display its not going to bug you at all, or if you dont even care, then whatever runs android 12 and thats great, you probably wont get a ton of updates out of this.

I dont know exactly how many updates youll get, but my guess is this would probably get you up to android 13 and then a bunch of security updates in between all of that stuff, mediatek sev, demensity, 700, processor, meaning that you know you can do mostly anything On this i did run a geekbench score on here, its not completely crazy, impressive to something that you might see on a high end phone, but you can see it got a score of 546 on the single core in 1737 on the multi core score, you can Play games on it, you can run websites all that and well kind of run through some of that stuff on here, um beyond that 4000 milliamp battery 18 watt charging so its not super fast charging, but it is somewhat fast charging. I think it takes about two hours to fully charge. You do get a headphone jack on here very rare currents on a lot of phones, but if you need a headphone jack, it does come with one usbc charging. It does come with stereo speakers on here. No wireless charging side mounted fingerprint sensor, which works really well, as you can see, ive already set it up once on here, and i am very happy with how accurate and fast it is. It works really really well even the design of the phone. You look at this. Its got the camera at the top here on top of the display, so its a very modern look very slim.

It is a flat display. I love it in terms of the looks its very simplistic, but you know what im fine with it. Its a huge display for a 6.81 inch, 1080p plus i it looks great fantastic with the display and the size of that um. You know it is a big yeah, i think for most people, but you know keep that in mind. One thing to know is, since this is like a you know: tcl branded phone youre, not gon na get a ton of accessories like you, wouldnt like an apple phone or even a samsung phone. So you might have some trouble finding a good amount of different cases, and things like that beyond that everything else will work with this, obviously bluetooth, any other charger you can use with this as well. What comes inside of the box also theres? No water resistance or dust resistance with this phone. So keep that in mind as well. You do get almost a rare occurrence. Again you get your 18 watt charging brick and your usb c charging, cable and thats pretty much ins out out in there. They dont give you any headphones wired headphones or anything like that. Not a big deal, though Music coming back in here so lets. You know i i did take some photos and videos so well check all that stuff out. Um you get a ton of different modes on here. Well, not a ton, but a fair amount enough to where to make you make yourself feel complete inside portrait mode panorama, video, auto mode.

You can uh, oh theres, your different ones. You have pro mode panorama. Stop motion slow motion, light trace super macro, high pixel goes up to 50 megapixel portrait mode, so lets check out some photos and videos that i took with the phone Music Applause Music. So i did want to show what this sounded like with the with a fan. Blowing nearby its not blowing directly on this im, holding it a little bit above it, but it was still. Maybe you can hear it. Maybe you cant just to give you some pollution in the noise just to see how this handles it. So one thing to know about the video is doesnt seem to be any optical image stabilization. It is only electronic and thats on both sides, the front and the back also the front, and the back only do up to 1080p video, but honestly, even phones that do 4k by default. Theyre set to 1080p, and i bet 90 of the people – dont even switch it so whatever right. So this is what it looks like front. Camera right now now lets switch to the back. All right here is the back ill stand here, just for a moment, just in case the stabilization just isnt that well or good im, assuming its probably not going to be that good, because it is eis but its a good way to keep the cost of a Phone down by using electronic rather than optical, because optical is like physical hardware within the phone lenses that would help with that.

So what do you think hows the look and sound? Let me know in the comments down below heres the ultra wide, very cool that it has ultra wide and also besides, that you can do up to 4x zoom when you want to zoom in so you can get kind of close to objects, not not incredibly close, But i mean at least you have some kind of zoom on there now i brought up youtube here so ill start up a youtube video for you guys well uh, go into uh lets. Do this spotify whats, going on guys welcome to gregors tv in this video im going to show you the must: must change setting on spotify to change? Why? Because you pay a premium to listen to this music and why not get the very best quality audio that you can get because by default, doesnt matter, if youre doing this for the first time or the last time when youve set up spotify on your phone. Even if you did it on an older phone, it doesnt carry over these quality settings, so you need to so one thing. I can tell right off the bat so without further ado, even that 480p. That looks actually really really good. Im really impressed with that uh. One thing i can tell with this is that the sound is um. I can definitely hear stereo speakers its just not very loud loud enough to hear it here, but you know youre in a busy, loud environment.

It might be a little difficult to hear but thats, where you get the headphone jack. You can do bluetooth, so all that stuff is going to be fine at the end of the day. Um the quality display looks really good on here. You know i dont see any issues with viewing angles. The colors look really good. When i pinch in to see the whole thing it actually pinches in it, doesnt take off a terrible amount of stuff, so overall quality of the the screen is really really nice. Im. Definitely impressed with it and then, like i said, with the sound, not amazing, itll get the job done in a pinch uh, but you know if i had to give the quality of the sound id, probably give it a four or five out of ten and then The quality of the screen id probably give it maybe an eight out of ten. Now i wouldnt say eight out of ten on any display um, but you know overall, it looks pretty good, just quality of the display for that price. 260 bucks. This display looks freaking really good, so, like just writing on it is actually a pretty smooth experience. Now, when i compare it to the galaxy s 22 ultra, that does feel a little bit better and it should has a faster processor as a s. Pen, thats bluetooth compatible and has lower latency when writing, but this is freaking pretty good like for what youre getting especially at 260ish dollars its.

I would call it amazing, really theres, like 10 different things to do. Basically, so you got your nebo for tcl, which is a free app that comes with the phone automatically pre installed. You dont have to do anything. What this does is it translates your notes. You can import pdfs, you can do a new freeform page or just a new page, and it will translate whatever that you write. You have to pretty much stay within the lines, so i havent used this too much. Let me see, let me choose a pencil here. We go so it got. Greg is the best, and i have that translated now. So, if you take a bunch of notes, you can save it as a type thing. So next lets go into so a little bit performance here, just running around the operating system. Like i said this has a demensity, 710 android police website so ill load that up google it. You can see everything loads up, pretty quick when i click on stuff. This is just running off my wi fi, but you can get 5g on t mobiles networks, so it works pretty good. There go into this article next with pocket operator pixel for hands on yeah its pretty nice again, its not its, not completely as fast. I think the thing is turn off thats, why its not rotating there we go now. It should rotate Music yeah, its pretty good im im pretty impressed with that, the the demensity processors, especially when you get higher up in there, they actually perform better than even snapdragon processors.

In terms of benchmarks. This one is obviously not the top end one, but it runs pretty well on here. Let me just go well go into settings next. There you go. You get all your stuff in here. Your advanced features, which will look at some of the software features, so performance. Pretty good opening up, apps and stuff like that, opening up the play, store, pictures rotating the display back and forth. So very nice performance just day to day stuff is going to be great software, so this is pretty bare bones when you come on here. This is like all the apps ive only app installed a few apps. I did get the nebo for tcl, which is it has to do with the the stylus. So does that calculator app game box was not pre installed, but thats gon na be like a game manager, type thing your tools, nothing too crazy. In there thats annoying anyway, you get your google apps thats, pretty much it youre, not getting a whole bunch of crapware. This is a 270 dollar phone and it again doesnt really have any cropware on its really really nice to see and it kind of runs. I mean its a kind of a bare bones version of android, but it is obviously like the little skin on top of it tcl skin on there, which is still pretty easy to figure out how to do you get your screen dedicated screenshot button.

You got your flashlight button, you got your settings when you come into settings, you can turn off uh buttons and gestures to change your system, navigation. If you want well just like any other android phone, you get advanced features. So if you want to do a sma, smart app recommends, you can turn that on and off your one handed mode. You can turn on game mode on and off screen recorder get your stylus sounds and vibrations rearrange your home screens, and you can put you know they do have kind of have a theme on here. You can either do round style, icons or square style or freestyle, and obviously you can down install a third party launcher if you wanted to, but ive always enjoyed the tcl software. I like it because its simplistic, but they still give you some nice options to customize the software overall now this does have 128 gigs of storage, but you can also put a micro sd card expansion storage in there as well again, very rare, to see in phones. Today but it does have it so you can add additional storage for really really low costs. The phone is made of plastic, which does not bother bothering me at all. You drop this its not going to crack like glass will if it hits a hard surface, at least it shouldnt, so plastic, i enjoy it, it keeps the weight down and it gives it a little bit more durability than glass and it doesnt feel cheap either.

Like im pressing on this – and you know, if you touched it real quick, you might be mistaken that its a is that glass or is that plastic, so it doesnt feel cheap at all. I dont think so anyway, and then the overall look of the phone is modern. I love the side mounted fingerprint sensor. The speakers are pretty okay, nothing amazing! The screen is absolutely beautiful. The performance is above adequate to be able to do what you want from some light gaming to web browsing to social media, taking photos and stuff like that, the cameras, okay, it gets the job done its definitely not amazing, but you know what can you expect for 270, bucks, this pretty much checks all the boxes and gets some of them to be really really good boxes at that.