TCL P80 Ultra brings OLED and e-reader mode to Europe

Under the bright lights of IFA, the matte screen on TCL’s new P80 Ultra kept reflections down as The Verge’s Dominic Preston tried it on the show floor. The phone is the first product using TCL’s OLED Nxtpaper display: OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, for ordinary color viewing, with a paperlike monochrome mode when the screen becomes an e-reader.

A dedicated Nxtpaper Key on the side switches to Max Ink Mode. The mode reduces the Android interface to fewer apps and notifications, adds software for reading, and turns the display monochrome. TCL says it can stretch the 5,800mAh battery to seven days of active use, or up to 26 days on standby. The screen also has a matte anti-glare surface, while TCL advertises direct-current dimming to reduce visible flicker.

The OLED panel is otherwise built around upper-tier phone specifications: 6.83 inches, 2766 × 1280 pixels, a 120Hz refresh rate and 3,200 nits of peak brightness. The Ultra carries 8GB of RAM, up to 512GB of storage, a MediaTek Dimensity 7400 Elite processor and 45W wired charging. Its cameras include a 50-megapixel main sensor, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 50-megapixel telephoto with 3x optical zoom. The Verge found TCL’s image processing behind that of larger rivals.

The Ultra is joined by the €429 P80 Pro, which keeps the OLED Nxtpaper display but drops the telephoto camera, and the €349 P80. The base model retains OLED but removes the Nxtpaper functions and uses a 5,000mAh battery. All three run Android 16. TCL says the Ultra and Pro will receive four years of operating-system updates and seven years of security support; the base P80 gets one fewer Android version update. The phones launch in Europe first, with Latin America following in October and the US later.

Concretely, the P80 Ultra gives people who read on a phone or want fewer distractions two display behaviors behind one physical switch: a full-color OLED for everyday use and a low-power, paperlike mode for reading. That makes the battery claim useful in the same moment as the display feature, not as a separate specification. The tradeoffs are clear too: the matte finish takes some getting used to, the camera processing trails bigger-name competitors, and the seven-day endurance figure remains a claim from TCL.