Ok, so I bought this because I saw what looked like good reviews and when I looked at the specs for the price it wasn't bad at all. But..... I'm rating this phone 3 stars for a couple of reason that for me are very important. Reason: 1 I use my phone for personal and business use. So I have apps that need to work properly at all times. There is a huge issue with push notifications. After researching online it is a well known issue with TCL phones. Why haven't they resolved this after these many phone and years? It seems related to the bloatware Smart Manager they pre-install that prevents some apps for auto-starting causing this problem. However even when you disable the automatic disabling of auto-start within Smart Manager, the problem still exists. Push notifications are highly inconsistent. Sometimes you get some, some times you don't. I never had this problem with any other Android phone. I realized I was not getting many notifications including work related messages when my old LG V60 I migrated from had a screen full of notifications and almost non coming to my TCL phone. It took me hours going through TCL online fixes/optimizations from sites just to get Gmail notifications to start coming and be more consistent. No one should have to do all of that to get basic functionality to work. This is a big problem also if you watch stock market or things that you need your instant notifications to work, it sometimes can be delayed by hours. Reason 2: I feel the speed at which they are updating their software is slow and indicative of how they are going to handle future updates. The company made a press release in May of 2021 about Android 12 preview program. So they already knew they were going to be releasing it. Android 12 officially released in October 2021. Supposedly it was going to start coming to TCL phones in December. As of July 2022, still no Android 12 on one of their best phones. To give you an example LG stopped making phones but my LG V60 still got Android 12 around April of this year. If TCL is trying to compete in this market they need to do better. Don't lag behind but be a leader. Make people want your phone over others. Now the overall device I did like. The bright curved screen is nice. The colors are much better than my V60. The TCL whites are white and blacks are black compared to my v60 which had a warmer yellowish tint. The speed seems to be pretty good and haven't noticed much lag at all of anything. Still having a SD Card expansion slot is big thing these days since all the big flag ship phones got rid of them. I think having 256GB of storage is great as well for the price point. I mostly use Bluetooth headsets so having a headphone jack is nice but not useful to me. It sounds nice, loud and speaker seems decent even though there's only one of them. I like that it has wireless and fast charging not seen on other mid range devices. I don't know how long the battery lasts because I always have it charging most of the time and haven't tested it being away for a long time. In all, I really liked the device itself and TCL had a huge opportunity to take the mid-range market especially us LG users that needed a new place to go. LOL. The Samsung A53 5G is not as good as this IMO for about the same price but their notifications probably work as there aren't complaints like there are for TCL. But sadly I feel I had to retract my recommendation for the device because the push notification issue is actually a deal breaker. I can't be missing work notifications or responding late or miss them from other important apps I have. Some suggest doing a factory reset. I just got the phone and it takes me a long time to setup my apps and restore my backups and settings. I'm not doing that just to see if it works better. I don't know if there is a way to fix it but it would be nice. Sadly I will probably be returning it.

The product is of good quality