Introduction
As you probably already know, Honor is a separate brand from Huawei, but they have access to Huawei technology which makes all new Honor devices very similar to Huawei flagships. This year it is the Honor 10 that bears a striking resemblance to the Huawei P20 Pro, only without the third camera. Fortunately, we managed to get a hold on the most desirable color option for this device – Phantom Blue. Next to the reflective blue color option, there are also green, black and grey. On this phone’s glass back, light produces really impressive reflective effects. Side edges of the device are made of aluminum.
With its flagship phone, Honor shipped out a fast charging adapter as well as user manuals, USB cable for charging and data transfer, protective gel case and a SIM tray tool.
Let’s take a closer look at what the Honor 10 has to offer.
Video review
Unboxing
Display
On the front panel, the Honor 10 holds a 5.84” IPS display with a notch on top. It can be made less visible through software, but not completely invisible since the matrix doesn’t produce that deep black colors. Once again we have a taller device due to the aspect ratio – 19:9 as opposed to 18.7:9 on the P20 pro. If smartphones continue this trend, we soon won’t need selfie sticks at all. Resolution of the display has remained FullHD+ and all images are crystal clear and very nicely reproduced. Inside the settings menu there are options to adjust color temperature, so you can choose either somewhat colder or warmer tones. Visibility on the sunlight is also decent, but only at maximum brightness.
Hardware and OS
At the moment the fastest Huawei chipset, the Kirin 970, made its way to this device as well. Alongside the chipset, the device comes in one of the two memory configurations, either 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage or 6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage memory. This chipset is also equipped with a neural processing unit which brings AI technology to the camera interface, but more on that a moment later.
When it comes to the speed of the device itself, it is really top notch. The CPU and GPU perform all tasks with no issues whatsoever, and you can’t feel any lag or framerate drop. On the AnTuTu benchmark, the device scored 202745 points.
Another interesting feature is now implemented into this device as well. The fingerprint scanner is now ultrasonic, and it is located beneath the display. Due to this technology, unlocking is a bit slowed down but very precise nonetheless.
On the bottom edge there is only a mono speaker. Sound is pretty nicely reproduced and it can get pretty loud, so there’s no issues here.
This device runs on Android Oreo 8.1 with Huawei Emotion UI version 8.1 on top of it. There is really a lot of ways to customize the interface.
Camera
If we were to scale the importance of different features on this device, we would definitely put an emphasis on the AI cameras that we’ve mentioned earlier. On its back, the Honor 10 has a double camera setup. One of these cameras has a 16 megapixel sensor with the aperture of f/1.8 and the other is a 24 megapixel monochrome sensor of the same aperture. Unlike the Huwaei P20 cameras, these ones are not signed by Leica, but they still work together in order to enhance photos in low light shooting conditions. The only thing that may be missing is optical image stabilization, but it is somewhat made up for by the use of electronic image stabilization. 2x optical zoom is also here. AI technology recognizes 22 categories of scenes and it will adjust photo parameters depending on what it is that you’re taking a photo of.
Day time photos taken by the primary camera always have a lot of details and well saturated colors, maybe even too much, but still, this effect always looks very nice. We didn’t notice any noise even In shadows, but it is still here when the light is very scarce – at night. Night time photos are not bad at all but we can’t sing songs about them since we’ve had a chance to see much better results on other devices.
When it comes to the front facing camera, there is a 24 megapixel sensor with the aperture of f/2.0. We’re really not used to seeing front facing camera with resolution this high. In practice, photos are once again very detailed, but the camera is missing one very important feature – autofocus system.
Videos captured by the primary camera are recorded in 4K resolution at 30fps, and also available is 1080p video recording at 60fps. Available codecs are h.264 and h.265 and both of these serve a purpose of reducing the size of video recordings. Electronic image stabilization is there during video recording as well, but only in FHD+ and lower resolutions. All resolution videos, 4K and lower on this phone look amazing and are one of the best that we’ve had a chance to see lately, they are very sharp with great dynamic range, color and contrast.
Connectivity
On the bottom of the Honor 10 there is a USB Type–C port that supports OTG connection. The phone is equipped with the same connectivity options as Huawei flagships, which means that it has NFC, Infra Red blaster, dual band Wi-Fi, aptX HD Bluetooth technology etc. All versions of this phone are Dual SIM with nano SIM card slots and without a microSD card slot.
List of connections contains:
- Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual band, Wi-Fi direct and HotSpot mode
- Bluetooth v4.2 with A2DP, LE, EDR, aptX HD
- GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS and GALILEO support
- NFC
- On The Go USB
Supported network frequencies are:
- 2G GSM: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz
- 3G HSDPA: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz
- 4G LTE: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 2100 MHz
Battery
This device has a slightly smaller battery compared to the P20 Pro as its capacity is 3400 mAh. The battery holds fine, but not particularly great, it can last up to 5 and a half hours with the screen on and the brightness set to around 60% while connected to Wi-Fi network. This smaller battery capacity is supplemented with improved Huawei Super Charge technology which is available on this device, and it works really well. It brings similar results as OnePlus Dash Charge system which means that this device charges up from 0 to 100% in only 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Final words
We really mean everything that we’ve said. The flaws of this device can be counted to the fingers of one hand, to be more precise on a single finger since we think that the only flaw is the lack of any sort of water and dust resistance. All other features on this phone are worth the price – 400 euros retail, while you can pick a new one online for about 350 euros. Take into account what we said at the beginning, the Honor 10 brings to the table specs very similar to those of the Huawei P20 Pro at half or even less than half of the price.
Huawei Honor 10 Full Specifications
Do you like the Honor 10? We’d like to hear your opinion in the comment section below. If you have any suggestions or you would like to see some new devices being reviewed, let us know either here or on our Facebook page. If you liked this review, subscribe to our YouTube channel, like us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram, sit back and relax as we’re working hard on new material for you.