TCL launches Verizon's most affordable 5G smartphone yet

The TCL 10 5G UW is ready to go on sale at the nation's largest wireless service provider on October 29 (that's this Thursday), fetching $399.99 straight off the bat with absolutely no strings attached. Incredibly enough, you can even take that all the way down to $40 with the right device trade-in, a new unlimited line, as well as monthly installments and bill credits.

At four Benjamins, this thing is a whopping 150 bucks cheaper than the Motorola One 5G UW and Samsung Galaxy A51 5G UW, which currently share the title of Verizon's most affordable 5G-enabled smartphones. As their convoluted names suggest, all three of these devices are equipped with full support for both blazing fast mmWave-based 5G Ultra Wideband technology and the carrier's freshly deployed nationwide 5G signal.

The latter uses a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to tap into existing low-band 4G LTE connections and bump them up to 5G speeds where available. While this allows Verizon to tout coverage for "more than" 200 million customers in "over" 1,800 cities across the country, the aforementioned speed upgrade over the already solid download numbers delivered by the operator's LTE network is likely to be negligible at best.

All that being said, it's impossible to deny the apparent quality/price ratio of the $400 TCL 10 5G UW, which pairs a respectable Snapdragon 765 processor with 6 gigs of memory while accommodating 128 gigs of data internally and supporting microSD expansion. Powered by a large 4,500mAh battery equipped with 18W charging capabilities, the very modern-looking handset adopts a trendy hole punch design with razor-thin bezels, as well as a premium combination of glass and metal build materials.

Around the back, the TCL 10 5G UW comes with a triple camera system composed of a 48MP primary snapper, 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens, and 5MP macro sensor, as well as a square-shaped fingerprint scanning module, while the 6.5-inch display sports a decent resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels and a 16MP selfie cam drilled in its top left corner.

If that spec sheet and price tag happen to sound familiar, that might be because T-Mobile sells the REVVL 5G at the exact same $400 tag with essentially identical features and an extremely similar design. Let the clone battles begin!