Huawei’s sub-brand Honor expanded its series with all new Honor 10. It’s the successor of flagship smartphone Honor 9 which was launched last year. Honor 10 comes with advanced AI system for the better use of the device. Apart from that, it houses a 6GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage and HiSilicon Kirin 970 Chipset for ultimate performance. Honor 10 seems to be a perfect rival for the flagship killer OnePlus. Let’s see how the smartphone performs and what more it can offer to the users in our review.
Design and Build:
Honor 10 comes with an exceptionally designed body. The rear panel has phantom blue coloured shine effect which gives different shades of blue on reflection. The design is safe under the glass back perfectly covered with the metallic curved edges. On the front, it may look similar to the Huawei P20.
The rear panel has Dual Camera setup at the top along with the sensors and an AI Camera logo is inscribed just beside the camera. At the bottom, there is Honor logo placed inside the glass cover. On the front, there’s a small notch which keeps the camera, speaker, and sensors. The bezels are ultra-thin and it offers maximum screen size.
The smartphone has on-screen buttons and a small hidden fingerprint sensor below the display panel. Honor 10 comes with an IR Blaster at the top and 3.5mm Audio Jack port at the bottom along with speaker grill and Type-C port. The Volume rocker keys and the power button is on the right while the SIM card slot is stapled on the left side of the edge.
Overall the design is compact, sturdy and bold. It has decent size and is light in weight makes it user-friendly. The only problem is the Glass back which makes it really slippery to hold on.
Display:
Honor 10 comes with 5.84-inch FHD+ display with 19:9 display ratio and a notch at the top. The display has a pixel resolution of 2280×1080. The smartphone offers an impressive display with a colourful and vibrant screen. The display seems clear, clean and sharp. The sunlight readability is good and adaptable. It also offers great viewing angles to the users.
Specifications:
Honor 10 is powered by HiSilicon Kirin 970 Chipset paired with 6GB of RAM. It comes with 128GB of internal storage which offers 110 GB of free space to the users. The storage can’t be upgraded further as it has no microSD card slot. It supports Dual micro SIM with 4G VoLTE connectivity. Other connectivity options are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, Mirror Sharing, GPS, and Type-C.
Talking about the software, it runs on Android 8.1 Oreo with its custom EMUI 8.1. The UI is pretty clean and easy to use. The notification and toggle drop is similar to most of the Android device. There is several preinstalled bloatware like Instagram, Netflix, UC Browser, Asphalt Nitro and many more. It surely consumes a lot of space.
Performance:
Honor 10 offers flagship performance with the chipset and 6GB of RAM. It runs smoothly even with more than 20 apps running in the background. The touch response is fast and effective. The multitasking ability of the smartphone is super impressive. The day-to-day performance is great and it takes them easily.
The gaming performance of the device is great. We ran several High-End games like Modern Combat 5, Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger 2 in it. There was no lag in the gameplay and the transitions were great. There was a minimal heating issue while playing the game for a long time but it can be neglected with the performance it providing.
The benchmark performance of the device is great and they are comparable to the devices which are in this budget range. It scored 201537 in AnTuTu which is impressive. The Geekbench score was 1898 in Single-Core and 6422 in Multi-Core which is amazing.
The Face Unlock and the Fingerprint Sensor, both works great. Although we didn’t require to use the fingerprint sensor most of the times. The Face Unlock unlocks the smartphone with just one glance within microseconds. The Audio and Video quality of the Honor 10 is good as it offers decent entertainment. The 4G LTE connectivity of the smartphone works fine and we didn’t find any type of lag or distortions in our usage.
Camera:
Honor 10 sports a Dual Camera of 24MP+16MP sensors. The 24MP is a monochrome camera while the 16MP camera is an RGB sensor. The camera is accompanied with the LED flash. The camera captures pretty accurate images with the combination of the two sensors. They have a good amount of in-depth details and colour saturation.
On the front, it has 24MP sensors for capturing selfies. The provided camera captures very impressive and beautiful selfies. They have a good amount of colour tone and saturation level. The AR lens offers different effects and backgrounds for fun.
The camera app is AI enhanced which can be turned ON/OFF within the camera app. The AI helps the sensors to select the appropriate mode when set in auto. Apart from it, it also offers several modes like PRO, HDR, Night Shot, Monochrome, Time Lapse and many more. Users can also download modes from the store.
Battery:
Honor 10 comes with 3400mAh of battery which lasts for 11 hours in our continuous video loop test which is average. We got 13 hours of battery life with moderate usage and a full day battery life with minimal usage. The battery capacity is good but it could be great with better optimizations. Honor 10 houses a powerful camera, chipset, and RAM which consumes a lot of battery so it could be better if they were well optimized. The good point is it has Type-C port which offers fast charging and it charges the smartphone within 2 hours.
Gizmo Verdict:
At a price point of Rs 32,999, Honor 10 is a great smartphone to go with. It has a super impressive design, great performing chipset and RAM, amazing camera and decent battery backup. All makes it a great smartphone to have. This segment is filled with lots of amazing smartphone like OnePlus 6 and Vivo X21, so you do have a choice. But if you want a stylish phone with great performance you can surely go for it.
