Best Prices Today: TCL D2 Plus Fingerprint Smart Lock

TCL jumped into the smart lock market late in late 2024 with some ambitious—and pricey—locks that were hit and miss, perhaps rushed to market without enough testing. The manufacturer has since taken a step back and is fleshing out its lineup a bit more thoughtfully, including the launch of this budget-priced offering, the TCL D2 Plus Fingerprint Smart Lock Plus.

Specifications

The TCL D2 Plus looks a lot like its big brother, the TCL D2 Pro, but with a major change under the hood: The Pro is a palm vein scanning lock, where the Plus relies on a more pedestrian fingerprint scanner as its primary authentication system. The biggest advantage is that the change helps get the price way down: An MSRP of $110 compared to $170 for the Pro model. That $60 difference makes it a solid value.

TCL now has its own mobile app, TCL Home, and it’s a great improvement over the generic Tuya app it used before.

The exterior of the aluminum-clad lock, which is rated IP55 for weatherproofing but with no ANSI/BHMA certification, offers only a few surprises, including the aforementioned fingerprint scanner, a touch-sensitive numeric keypad, and support for NFC cards (the SKU reviewed here doesn’t come with any cards, but you can buy the lock bundled with several fobs at Amazon for just a few dollars more). An exposed physical keyhole—along with two keys—provides another means of entry.

An understated doorbell button is embedded in the lock’s keypad. When a visitor presses the button, you’ll hear a chime and receive a push notification on your smartphone. This product is not a video doorbell, however, and it has no video features at all; nor does TCL offer a secondary chime that can be installed inside the house. A USB-C port on the bottom of the exterior escutcheon can be used for emergency access if the lock’s batteries die while you’re out.

Speaking of batteries, you’ll need to bring your own: Eight AA cells, which TCL says will provide about 6 months of running time. The lock connects directly to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network, eliminating the need for a bridge or smart home hub. Amazon Alexa and Google Home are both supported if you want to extend your ecosystem beyond the basics of the TCL Home app.

Installation and setup

The process of installing the TCL D2 Plus is the same as it is for entry-level locks, with two bolts connecting the exterior escutcheon to a mounting frame on the inside of the door. The interior escutcheon mounts to that frame with just two more bolts, and a single electrical cable connects the two components, making this a quick install compared to the rest of the industry. Popping the eight batteries into place feels like the more onerous part of the process.

More good news: TCL has moved from the awful Tuya app that it initially relied upon for the TCL D1 series, and now has its own mobile app, TCL Home. This is a great improvement, and setting up the lock with this app was simple. The app automatically discovered the lock once it was powered up, and pressing a button under the battery cover completed the onboarding process. Answering a few simple questions added the lock to my Wi-Fi network, and after three(!) firmware updates it was ready for use.

Using the TCL D2 Plus Finger Print Smart Lock

The TCL D2 Plus is largely intuitive and easy to use, although you’ll need to spend a bit of time in the settings menu to optimize it fully. One option I recommend changing immediately is to turn off “Device Security,” which requires you to enter a PIN in the app every time you use the app, which quickly becomes very tiresome.

Other settings cover the basics: Auto locking can be set to between 10 and 120 seconds (though the lock has no door sensor and will lock whether it’s open or closed), and wrong-try protection lets you specify 5 to 10 incorrect permission attempts before it disables the lock for 2 to 5 minutes. Notifications can be individually set for unlocking, locking, doorbell presses, and alarm conditions (such as the activation of wrong-try lockout).

Each of these activities is logged in the Events tab on the home screen and is summarized by day and week in the Home Assistant tab. One additional feature on this tab is called Homecoming Reminder, which is a type of alarm/reminder that will push a notification to the administrator if a configured user has not returned home and unlocked the door within a window of time that you set. It’s clearly designed for parents to keep tabs on children, and it worked well in my testing.

User management is well designed, with credentials assigned user by user. Each user can have multiple fingerprints, PINs (4 to 8 digits), and NFC cards assigned. The lock supports up to 100 of each type of credential in total. Fingerprints and NFC cards always provide 24/7 access; PINs can be set to permanent or time-limited, although there is no facility for recurring passwords that are valid, say, only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Duress PINs can be used to send an alert to the administrator if a user is unlocking the door under duress, so the admin can notify authorities. Lastly, one-time, immediate-use passwords can be generated on demand within the app; these expire within 10 minutes, and only one can be active at a time.

I encountered no significant issues working with the TCL Home app or the lock’s input systems throughout several days of testing. My only real complaint about using the lock was with some aspects of the hardware itself. The thumbturn requires a lot of pressure to get the bolt to extend all the way, and the motor can’t get the job done either, though the bolt made it most of the way to full extension—just a couple of millimeters shy.

I wasn’t thrilled with the way the deadbolt jiggles around when it’s extended, either, feeling a bit loose and unsteady. Without formal testing it’s hard to know how secure the lock is physically; but anecdotally, it just doesn’t feel all that secure. Remember, the lock is not ANSI/BHMA certified.

The doorbell on the front of the lock, meanwhile, feels like an afterthought. The tiny icon is not illuminated unless the keypad is lit up, and I would never realistically expect a visitor to find the button to tap. It is, however, very easy to accidentally press it when you’re trying to unlock the door. My advice: Set it to mute and forget it’s there.

Should you buy the TCL D2 Plus Fingerprint Smart Lock?

I’ve seen the street price of the TCL D2 Plus Fingerprint Smart Lock drop as low as $80, making for a very good deal. It’s a bit less of a bargain at its $120 MSRP, but it still feels like a reasonable price for what you get.

At the very least, this lock is a dramatic upgrade over the still-available TCL D1 series, putting TCL in a much better position to merit consideration in the smart lock space.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart locks.

Best Prices Today: TCL D2 Plus Fingerprint Smart Lock

Author: Christopher Null, Contributor, PCWorld