AmazingTech: TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra review: Against the grain

I’m a sucker for a matte display, so the TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra caught my eye immediately. This smartphone takes some cues from its e-reader cousins, with an enormous display that has TCL’s matte Nxtpaper coating and a dedicated e-ink mode. The aim is to bridge the gap between the two forms, giving you the option to leave your Kindle at home and simply read on your phone.

Does it pull it off? For the most part, yeah. Reading, writing and doodling with the bundled stylus are as pleasing as on any e-reader and a surprisingly strong camera offering ensures that the phone side of things is well represented, too. Performance and battery life aren’t the best but neither is bad enough to be cause for major concern. 

If you’re sick of carrying around both phone and e-reader, the TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra could be the space-saving hybrid you’ve been waiting for. 

TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra: What you need to know

The TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra is what happens when a smartphone and an e-reader love each other very, very much. It’s fronted by a massive 7.2in LCD display – larger than both the standard Kindle and the Kindle Paperwhite, albeit with a skinnier aspect ratio – with a resolution of 2,340 x 1,080 and a peak refresh rate of 120Hz.

What makes this hybrid lean closer to its e-book ancestry is the matte coating over the screen, which helps to reduce glare and creates a more paper-like feel when swiping or writing with a stylus, just as you get on an e-reader.

Completely the transformation is the Nxtpaper Key, a switch on the right edge that allows you to quickly swap between normal phone mode and either the Colour Ink, Black-and-white Ink or Max Ink modes. The former two just affect the colouring while the latter better emulates an e-reader, limiting app functionality to allow you to focus more on your reading.

There’s a 32-megapixel (f/2.0) selfie camera nestled in a hole-punch notch near the top of the screen, while over on the rear, we’ve got a triple-camera set-up: a 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main lens, a 50-megapixel (f/2.4) 3x periscope telephoto camera and an 8-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide shooter. 

Inside is a 2.6GHz MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chipset, backed up by 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and a 5,200mAh battery. There’s no wireless charging here but it supports wired charging up to 33W.

Price and competition

It’s tricky to compare the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra to other phones, simply because there’s not really anything else like it on the market right now. 

We’ve only got one configuration in the UK, with 12GB of RAM and a fantastic 512GB of internal storage, and it will cost you £500. Also worth noting is that you get a stylus and flip cover included at that price. 

That puts the TCL in the same ballpark as my favourite mid-range phone, the Google Pixel 9a. This is currently just £349 for the 128GB model or £449 for the 256GB version. There’s no 512GB variant and, of course, it lacks the massive display and e-ink qualities of the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra, but makes up for it with excellent battery life and software support.

The Honor 400 Pro has a larger display – though still not in TCL territory – with a 6.7in AMOLED screen that’s particularly well-suited to gaming. There’s only one storage configuration, with the same generous 512GB as the Nxtpaper, and it will cost you £449. 

Finally, you can just about get a new iPhone for this kind of money, with the iPhone 16e starting at £549. Just like the Pixel, however, that only gets you 128GB of storage, with the 512GB version considerably more, at £849.

Design and key features

At 227g, the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra isn’t what I would call heavy for a smartphone but it’s definitely close to the threshold. There are smaller phones that weigh more than this – the iPhone 17 Pro Max is 233g, for instance – but my concern is that e-readers tend to weigh much less. The standard Kindle, for instance, is an airy 158g, which will be much easier on the wrist during extended reading sessions. Though, of course, its functionality is much lower, so it is a trade-off. 

Otherwise, the design of the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra is fine enough; it measures 81 x 7.6 x 175mm (WDH) and pairs a matte plastic frame with a frosted plastic rear. It’s rated IP68 for dust and water resistance, meaning that it’s fully dust-tight and can be submerged in up to 1.5m of water for 30 minutes, giving a bit of peace of mind for those that fancy a read in the bath.

There’s technically a white option in other territories but here in the UK, we only get the black model, which can feel a little drab, but the glittery blue hue in the camera housing adds a much-needed touch of unique flavour.

Also bundled in with the phone are a rigid plastic case, a folio cover that attaches magnetically and a stylus housing that clips neatly onto the side. Altogether, it’s quite a bulky bundle but it does feel very complete. The stylus in particular is a fantastic inclusion: whether you’re adding notes over a document or doodling in a paint app, the pen is impressively responsive and the slight friction of the matte display feels wonderfully tactile.

The software is based on Android 16 with TCL’s own-brand UI pasted over the top. This is generally simple and straightforward, steering close Google’s style, and I appreciated the relatively low amount of preinstalled apps, with just the likes of Booking.com and TikTok feeling like unnecessary inclusions. 

TCL is committing to three years of OS updates and seven of security patches. That’s an interesting combination that puts the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra on par with the Google Pixel 9a as offering a class-leading security update roadmap, but OS updates fall rather short: the Pixel is getting seven and the Honor 400 Pro is getting six, for instance.

Display

The massive 7.2in LCD screen got decently bright in my testing, hitting 659cd/m² on manual mode and rising to 780cd/m² on auto brightness with a torch shining on the light sensor.

Colour accuracy was some of the best I’ve seen in this price range, too. There are four colour profiles to choose from, with Vivid and Advanced Saturated delivering more punchy colours – perfect for streaming and gaming – while Natural and Advanced sRGB shoot for authentic sRGB reproduction. I had the best results on the latter, with a gamut coverage of 97.7% and a total volume of 100.3%. The average Delta E came back at just 0.94, which is right on the money for our target of 1 or under. 

That being said, the LCD screen did falter slightly with the contrast and black levels. Neither recorded as particularly bad but they were both higher than I’d have liked to see: the contrast ratio of 1,225:1 is a little soft and the black luminance of 0.56cd/m² means that black areas can look more dark grey than truly, inky black.

Speaking of inky, the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra also offers three e-ink screen modes, just like you get on e-readers. Flick the slider on the right edge up and you’ll be presented with the choice of Colour Paper Mode, Ink Paper Mode and Max Ink Mode. You can make a new choice each time you switch or set your choice to auto apply next time, if you only see yourself using one mode. 

Colour Paper Mode uses fairly muted colours, similar to the likes of the Kindle ColorSoft, and is better suited to magazines and graphic novels, while Ink Paper Mode and Max Ink Mode are the way to go for books and documents. The latter in particular feels very zen to switch on, as it closes all running apps and only allows notifications from the apps you choose, making it a quick way to shut the world out and focus on your book. 

The matte Nxtpaper coating is great here, too, as it vastly reduces glare, making using the phone under bright lights much easier – I found this particularly useful when reading next to a train window on a sunny winter’s day. There’s also a bevy of eye-care features, including blue light reduction and dimming down to just 2 nits for reduced eye strain during night-time reading sessions.

Performance and battery life

The MediaTek Dimensity 7400 chipset is a solid performer for this price range. It’s clocked up to 2.6GHz and backed up by a generous 12GB of RAM and general use is reasonably fluid, opening and hopping between apps without lag and scrolling smoothly through menus and webpages. 

That being said, you can get much faster phones for this kind of money. Just look at the graph below and you’ll see the Pixel 9a and the OnePlus Nord 5 in particular charging far out in the lead, with the Pixel 46% ahead of the TCL in the Geekbench 6 multi-core scores and the OnePlus besting the Nxtpaper by a massive 62%.

It’s a similar story on the gaming front. The Nxtpaper 60 Ultra is decent enough for lite fare – think more Candy Crush than COD: Mobile – but those who regularly engage in fast-paced 3D mobile gaming sessions will find the Google Pixel 9a or OnePlus Nord 5 more capable of keeping up.

Pairing such an enormous display with a relatively middle-of-the-road 5,200mAh battery was always going to be a point of concern and my testing confirms this. The battery life isn’t bad by any stretch – a few years ago, I’d have been saying this is pretty good for a smartphone – but you can get much better from other phones around this price. 

Running our standard looping video test, the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra lasted for just over 18 hours before dying. That’s enough juice to see you through a day of moderate screentime, especially if you’re mostly using it in e-ink mode, but more intensive users will appreciate either the Google Pixel 9a or the OnePlus Nord 5, both of which went beyond 30 hours in the same test.

Charging is solid enough, at least. The Nxtpaper 60 Ultra supports wired charging up to 33W, which brought the phone from empty to 53% in 30 minutes during my testing, while a full charge took around 1hr 15mins.

Cameras

I was a little taken aback by just how competent the cameras are – with such a focus on the display, I figured the lenses would feel very much like an afterthought. But that’s not the case at all. 

The 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main camera has a large 1/1.55in sensor and optical image stabilisation, which allows it to capture a brilliant level of fine details – you can clearly make out individual blades of grass in the image below. The HDR processing occasionally steers a little too hard into the highlights but otherwise, this is a wonderfully well-rounded shooter.

It performed well in low-light, too; colours are fairly natural, there’s plenty of detail plucked out of shadowy areas and big blocks of darkness are free of excessive visual noise.

The 50-megapixel (f/2.4) 3x periscope telephoto camera is somewhat rare for this price range, so its presence here is already a big positive. Beyond merely attending class, however, it’s also just a very good camera. 

Optical zooms at 3x (below) and hybrid 6x shots were particularly impressive in testing, with excellent detail and light balancing making them well-suited to portrait photography. You can technically hit hybrid zooms up to 100x but the quality at maximum magnification is so blurry that it may as well not be included. Stick to under 30x for the best results.

I was quite surprised by the quality of the ultrawide camera, too. Despite only using an 8-megapixel sensor, it managed to deliver a decent amount of detail in my testing, and the colour tone was impressively close to that of the main camera, too. 

Rounding out the suite is a selfie snapper that achieves natural-looking skin tones and crisp portrait shots and video that shoots up to 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps. You only get electronic stabilisation with the latter but it served well enough in my testing, keeping the worst of my hand shake out of the final footage.

TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra: Verdict

I can accept the weaker performance scores – this isn’t trying to be a powerhouse or ultimate gaming machine – but it would have been nice to see the Nxtpaper 60 Ultra being a bit more competitive on the battery life front. And with such a focus on the display, the lack of OLED technology, and the softer contrast ratio it brings, feels like a missed opportunity. 

With that being said, the TCL Nxtpaper 60 Ultra does something that no other phone is doing right now, bridging the gap between smartphones and e-readers and delivering a phone with a massive display that is a delight to take notes on and can morph into a zen reading space with the literal flick of a switch. It’s not going to be for everyone but those to whom it caters will struggle to find a better fit than this.