Review: TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G

Everyone wants to filter out blue light. Whether through your glasses, laptop, or smartphone, companies have hopped on the bandwagon to integrate blue light blockers to cut the wavelength from reaching your eyes. The claim is to help improve sleep and reduce eyestrain, even though studies have yet to find these blockers effective.

TCL is one such company. It has been manufacturing phones and tablets with its “Nxtpaper” LCD technology for a few years, and the third generation in the TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G smartphone is good enough to block 61 percent more blue light than a normal tablet to “protect your eyes and reduce eye fatigue.” I've used this $250 Android phone for more than a week, and I don't think the claims hold up, but I've still come to enjoy the matte paperlike screen. Don't buy it for the blue-light blocking promises; buy it because the matte screen looks and feels nice.

Matte Screen

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

The 60 XE's main attraction is the Nxtpaper matte LCD. It has a pleasing paperlike texture and isn't reflective. Colors are a smidge more muted than phones with OLED screens, and text and app icons can appear a little fuzzy—I only really noticed this when comparing it side by side with another handset.

The phone's back has a similar matte texture, though with a marble pattern for a luxe look, complete with a glossy, round camera module. A friend said it looked “fancy," though I find it teeters on tacky. I don't mind the marble pattern, but the camera module isn't symmetrical and feels a little out of place. Still, it doesn't look like any other $250 smartphone. That's a plus.

Back to the Nxtpaper display, though. On the right edge of the phone is the Nxtpaper switch, and flicking it up lets you choose from three display modes: Color Paper Mode, Ink Paper Mode, and Max Ink Mode. I'll get to what these modes do, but I want to point out that the switch feels cheap and has a slight rattle. Switching modes also takes a beat—it plays a little tune and animation each time, and I can't find a way to disable this. (You can at least set it so that it enters a specific mode when you flip the switch instead of having to choose every time.)

Standard mode

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Ink Paper Mode

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Color Paper Mode desaturates and softens the colors, almost like a color E Ink ebook reader. Ink Paper Mode strips away all color and goes black and white, and the color temperature of the screen is less blue. This is still an LCD, but to my eyes, it's better than Android phones that try to use E Ink. You get a similar paperlike reading experience and a matte screen, but unlike the Minimal Phone or the Boox Palma 2, it's not frustrating or slow. The 120-Hz screen refresh rate and decent onboard CPU make it perform like a normal phone.

I've enjoyed switching to either of these modes when I'm reading, whether through Chrome, Google News, or even doomscrolling through Bluesky. I usually turn it off and use the standard mode when swiping through Instagram Reels, though nothing's stopping you from watching videos in these modes if you prefer the desaturated look.

The three display modes.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Max Ink Mode is much more extreme. It limits background app processes and power consumption while turning your phone screen black and white. You also get a special homescreen—four fixed apps that you can't change at the bottom (Phone, Messages, Contacts, Settings), and then you can add eight apps of your choosing. You'll get notifications from these apps, and them alone. This mode is designed to be used for large bouts of reading, say in the Kindle app, and if that's what you end up doing, it greatly extends battery life to several days. Again, a mode like this makes way more sense than buying a Boox Palma 2, because it gets very close to the experience of an E Ink screen, without the annoyingly slow refresh experience.

But there is one big problem with TCL's Nxtpaper tech: it's hard to see in direct sunlight. Don't get me wrong, it's not that you can't use the phone outdoors. In shady areas or even on cloudy days, I didn't have much trouble reading the screen. But with the sun directly overhead, it's nearly impossible to read. The company says this has been addressed with its Nxtpaper 4.0 generation, but that's a hardware change, so you'll only see it in new TCL phones and tablets with Nxtpaper 4.0 technology.

A Capable Budget Phone

The good news is that the 60 XE is a solid budget Android phone. The MediaTek Dimensity 6100+ processor and 8 GB of RAM deliver decent performance, though you'll see some stutters here and there and occasional choppy animations. My benchmark scores put it slightly ahead of the $200 Moto G 2025, but my real-world experience was much more positive as the 60 XE is nowhere as stuttery as the Moto, likely due to the increased RAM.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

The 5,010-mAh battery feels like it should last longer—I routinely hit around 30 to 25 percent by bedtime with average use, though you can extend it with Max Ink Mode. There's no wireless charging, but this phone has all the accouterments you'd want, from a microSD card slot for expandable storage and NFC for contactless payments to a headphone jack. The phone feels a little slippery and top-heavy, so I recommend finding a case to be safe, though I've dropped it a handful of times and luckily don't see any scratches on the glass screen.

It'll work with every major US carrier and is exclusively sold unlocked on Amazon, a nice break from many other TCL phones that are locked to a carrier in the US. Speaking of, I didn't have any issues with the 5G connectivity, but I did get some comments about call quality. I didn't have trouble hearing others, though I wish the call volume could get louder, but a few people struggled to hear me via the phone's speaker mode. I tested this with some friends, who didn't have any issues, so it's hard to say if it's a network problem or the caller's hardware.

That leaves the camera, which isn't terrible for a $250 phone. Quality heavily depends on the lighting, and even indoors during daylight, you'll probably want to turn on Night mode to avoid a blurry photo. The 50-MP main can struggle with high-contrast scenes, and colors don't look super accurate, but the results are passable. No problems scanning QR codes, at the very least.

The biggest drawback is software updates. This phone runs Android 15, and TCL is only promising one Android upgrade to Android 16 at some point in the future. No more Android features after that, though it'll get a total of two years of security updates. It's not significantly worse than other phones at this price, but Motorola now offers two Android upgrades for its Moto G phones. TCL should do better.

I'd buy a CMF Phone 2 Pro ($279) over the TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G, as it looks better, has stronger performance, and nicer cameras. But the pleasing matte screen has this calming quality that I've come to enjoy over the past week, and I like the ability to switch to even less saturation or monochrome if I'm reading a lot. If you've eyed something like the Boox Palma 2 for some time, I think you'll have a much nicer experience with this TCL.