A leaked roadmap reveals how TCL plans to enter its own-brand phones into the market. It starts with a mid-range T1 device, which will purportedly see three other revisions - including 5G models - before the company's exciting folding phone launches in summer 2020.
As usual, the leak comes from the usually well-informed Twitter account of Evan Blass, and shows the T1, T1 Pro, T1 5G, T1 Pro 5G and then the foldable device which - in this leak - is referred to as the FlexTab.
This is potentially big news for the company, which up until now has only launched phones under other brands; namely - Alcatel, BlackBerry and Palm brands.
If the leak is accurate, those devices will launch in Q3 this year, Q1 in 2020, Q2 in 2020 and Q3 in 2020, respectively, with the prices going up in increments as well.
The timeline shows prices of €299, €399, €499, €599 and - finally - €1299 for the folding phone with a flexible display.
Following on from this roadmap, Blass revealed a spec sheet of the T1 to show what we can expect from the company's first own-brand Android phone, and the specs look decent for a sub €300 device.
From the looks of things, it's a big, fully featured mid-ranger boasting a 6.53-inch full HD+ display with a hole-punch cutout for the front camera. It also supposedly has the Snapdragon 675 processor inside, along with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage.
The cameras on the back include a primary 48-megapixel sensor, similar to many other current phones, with a secondary ultra-wide 16-megapixel camera. As for that third lens, that seems to be just a low resolution camera for depth information.
As well as that, it runs Android Pie (with a Q update coming via OTA), and features a 3,820mAh battery that can charge quickly via an 18W charger.
From the back, its design looks quite similar to Huawei's Mate 10 series, with its stripe across the back near the cameras, but the notch-less display on the front is far more like what we've seen from the likes of Honor and Samsung.
Of course, the exciting phone in this lineup is the FlexTab. We got an early glimpse at a prototype folding phone from TCL while at MWC 2019, and at that point, it was clear that it wasn't anywhere near ready for launch.
We suspected, that with a product so new and innovative that it wouldn't make sense to launch the phone under either the BlackBerry or Alcatel brands, and this leaked roadmap seems to confirm those suspicions.
What's also interesting is the rumoured price. At €1,299, it's still quite an expensive phone, but is significantly less expensive than either the Samsung Galaxy Fold or Huawei Mate X. And let's not forget, neither of those two phones has hit the market yet.
It'll be interesting to see how consumers respond to TCL's own phones, with so many probably not realising the company even exists. But by the time the folding device is launched - presuming it's marketed well - we think it might be a company that's impossible to ignore.