TCL 50 XL 5G Review: A lot of phone for not a lot of money

Smartphone reviewers began asking a couple years ago: “Are good smartphones getting cheap, or are cheap smartphones getting good?” That distinction seems to get blurrier every year as more companies make even more phones to fit every space in the smartphone market.

TCL has spent the past few years making some pretty solid phones. They’ve shifted away a bit from the higher end to focus more on the mid-range and budget phones and the new TCL 50 XL 5G is their latest entrant into the budget sector.

Before we start…

Why review a budget phone?

Reviewing smartphones while, at times, can be a bit pedantic (especially considering the extremely boring and iterative designs for the past few years), is tough. There are a lot of things to consider and far too often I feel most reviewers – myself included – can quickly fall into a trap of our own making. We get so caught up in the specs and features of a phone that we forget the most important part of it – the customer. We forget that the company who made the phone spent quite a bit of time and money gathering huge amounts of data to figure out exactly who to make their phones for.

And spoiler alert: it’s never you and me.

As a tech enthusiast (which I assume also includes most of you), with the rare exception of some enthusiast phones, we are never the target market for any smartphone; there just aren’t enough of us. We make up a very tiny majority of the people who actually buy smartphones. I’ve worked in both Best Buy and the Apple Store so I’ve spent a lot of time selling phones to quite a lot of people. And trust me, folks like you and me are few and far between.

All this to say, I wanted to approach this review by keeping that firmly in mind. I wanted to look at this device from the perspective of who it’s actually meant for. The 50 XL 5G is exclusive to Metro PCS on T-Mobile and is available for $169 or even free for many customers. So what do you get for $169? Not a bad phone, to be honest.

TCL 50 XL 5G Specs

Let’s start with the specs. Keep in mind, this phone is only $169 so don’t expect flagship-level stuff here. But think about it for what you’re getting for a few Hamilton’s shy of two hundred bucks:

TCL 50 XL 5G: Design and display

The design of the 50 XL 5G is certainly uninspired, but it does have a few things I appreciate. First, the back has that faux leather texture that makes it much easier to hold than just flat glass and helps it stand out a bit from all other glass slabs out there.

The circular camera bump on the back is very OnePlus-esque but I also like it. If phone makers are going to continue to build phones that require camera bumps, I much prefer ones that have some intentionality to their design over say, the iPhone that just feels like it slapped them on there and called it a day.

Around front is a 6.78 inch IPS LCD display which puts it right in line with most other flagships these days also pushing above 6.7 inches. Sadly, while the 1080p display looks pretty nice when using it indoors, it doesn’t hold up in sunlight. I often had trouble seeing it outdoors, but that actually helped me be more conscious about putting my phone down outside. However, if you work or spend most of your time outside, this probably won’t work for you.

I was pleasantly surprised by the 120Hz refresh rate. That’s a feature that’s still fairly uncommon among phones that cost several hundred dollars so it’s nice to see it at this price point. The fast refresh rate helped everything feel smoother and more responsive as I navigated through the UI, and provided a decent gaming experience across most of what I played. Granted, I didn’t even attempt some of the bigger games available, but as long as you keep the graphics low and for most casual games it will be great.

It comes in just one color called Slate Gray which is more of a cool blue on the back, and I couldn’t find any IP rating to speak of so I’d be careful with it around water.

TCL 50 XL 5G: Performance

I was impressed with the performance of the 50 XL 5G. I’ve used other budget phones in the past that have been nearly unusable for how slow and unresponsive they were, but the 50 XL 5G performed quite well in my time with it. That’s not to say there weren’t any delays or slow ups from time to time, but it was never more than a few seconds and never enough to inhibit my experience with it.

From opening apps to downloading files to streaming content on Netflix and Disney+, I never got frustrated or annoyed with sluggish performance – absolutely not something I can say about other sub-two-hundred dollar phones I’ve used.

This is helped out quite a bit by the inclusion of 6 GB of RAM, which is very generous at this price point. Other budget phones from Motorola and others are still only starting with 4 GB of RAM so kudos to TCL for coming out strong.

6GB of RAM is still the exception on budget phones.

As I said, I didn’t spend too much time playing the big massive mobile games out there today, because this phone isn’t meant for that and the people buying this phone likely aren’t hardcore mobile gamers. I did fire up Call of Duty Mobile for a few minutes and kept the graphics settings to the lowest possible settings and it ran fine. The phone did heat up after several minutes of play, but never became unbearably hot.

TCL 50 XL 5G: Camera

Let’s not kid ourselves by thinking the cameras on this phone will be anywhere near amazing. Sadly, I’d be hard pressed to even say they’re good. I can confidently say they are usable. In decent lighting with mostly still subjects, you’ll get pictures that are more than good enough for sharing or posting (which is where all our photos end up anyway).

In any other situation, you can get ones that work in the moment, but aren’t going to blow anyone away. And I wouldn’t even bother trying to take pictures at night unless you can find a decent light source and can stand still for a few seconds to let it get the shot.

Video is perfectly acceptable as well for capturing moments of the kids or pets when necessary. Just don’t expect to be moving while you’re capturing it.

The 8MP selfie camera is, again, perfectly passable in good conditions, but really not worth using outside of that. It will work for video calls just fine, but I wouldn’t give any important presentations with it.

TCL 50 XL 5G: Battery and Charging

The 5010 mAh battery gives a decent amount of battery life, provided you aren’t pushing the phone too heavily. I was able to make it comfortably through a full day with pretty light use, meaning a few texts, some emails, a couple of calls, and a YouTube video or three.

I don’t spend much time on social media in general so if you tend to doom scroll, your mileage will likely be much less due to that nice 1080p 120Hz screen. The same is true if you plan to game much on this or if you spend more than a couple of hours on your phone during the day.

The 18W ‘fast’ charging on the 50 XL 5G certainly makes me appreciate the 80W charging on the OnePlus 12R more than ever, but it’s still better than what you’ll find on most other phones at this price. Thankfully, I rarely needed to charge it during the day so I could just plug it in at bed time and be fine, but just don’t expect to get a quick recharge when you’re running low.

TCL 50 XL 5G: Software

The 50 XL 5G is running TCL’s very lightly skinned version of Android 14. It’s great to see a budget phone launching with the latest Android software, but TCL’s skin leaves a few things to be desired.

The biggest annoyance I ran into was that it often took me several tries to even move an app icon from the app drawer to my home screen. Seriously, I would tap and hold and it would let me edit, but whenever I would move my finger to go back and place it on the home screen, it would just leave editing mode. This happened so often I finally just gave up moving some of my apps to the home screen. Just download a third party launcher and don’t look back.

OTHER GRIPES

It’s also not as customizable as some other launchers, but that’s become sadly more common among OEM launchers anyway. I typically use Lawnchair or Nova launcher these days anyway.

Other than that, the software was easy to use and quick to navigate. I don’t have any other complaints that can’t be solved with using a different launcher.

Scratch that; there is one other major downside of the 50 Xl 5G’s software. TCL is only promising one year of platform updates and two years of security updates. In truth, that’s not too surprising considering the price of the phone, and again, the people buying this phone likely won’t know or care, but I still wish manufacturers would find a way to offer, at the very least, more security updates.

TCL 50 XL 5G: Final thoughts

There’s quite a lot to like about the TCL 50 XL 5G (apart from the name at least). The screen is fast and pretty, there’s plenty of RAM and storage, and it performs great. There are also some nice-to-see-features like Google Pay – sadly uncommon on budget phones – and, of course, the whole thing is less than $170 and can easily be had for free.

The Metro PCS/T-Mobile exclusivity is a bit of a bummer and the lackluster software commitment is disappointing, but for anyone looking to score a solid phone for not a lot of money – or even a backup phone that might come in handy – the TCL 50 XL 5G is pretty easy to recommend.

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