Honor 10 – review

Honor has serious global ambitions, only we have learned what the strategy is for our country. Their new flagship, View20, is announced to be interesting and it remains to be seen at work.

For now, after the Honor 8X mid-ranger, we analyze in detail the Honor 10, a powerful, compact smartphone with a good price / specification ratio.

Video review

Huawei Honor 10 specifications:

Design

Honor 10 came to us in the box where we also found the SuperCharge USB charger, the USB type-C - USB cable, the transparent silicone case and the clip for the dual sim slot. Most likely, the retail package will also contain a warranty certificate, manual or quick user guide.

The smartphone comes in a box with a plastic foil ready to be mounted on the screen. Along with the silicone protective cover, we could say that Honor 10 is insured against any scratches that may occur from the first moments of use.

Rarely do you come across smartphones as compact as the Honor 10. Even with the bottom edge that integrates the fingerprint sensor, the Honor 10 manages to keep a length of less than 15 centimeters on a 5.84-inch screen. The smartphone can be used without problems and with one hand, even if the grip offered by the flat glass on the back is not great at all. Moreover, the fingerprints are "caught" immediately on the case, although I would not say that they are so visible. However, it is recommended to use the case in the box, especially since this way you will also protect the dual main camera lenses, which stand out slightly from the profile of the device.

Even though it is no longer a unique element, the pattern under the rear window, slightly curved towards the side edges, reflects the light in an interesting way. There are more shades of blue in this case, and even sometimes you can see purple reflections.

Honor 10 feels like a well-built, solid smartphone, carefully finished and with good quality materials. However, he doesn't have anything really spectacular and I don't think he wanted to bring that.

Screen and sound

Fashion may change in a few months, and the classic notch, bangs, will become an obsolete element, being gradually replaced by cropped screens. Until then, like many other smartphones, Honor 10 remains with bangs, one not at all intrusive, quite small in size.

In addition to the notch, we also have rounded corners, as well as a 19: 9 look. Thus, the resolution is a FullHD + 2280 x 1080 pixels. A diagonal of 5.84 inches results in a density of about 432 ppi, enough for the IPS display to have no problems with the exact contouring of any image.

The colors are pleasant, vivid, good contrast, and the maximum brightness is sufficient even in direct sunlight. The viewing angles are very wide, only slight changes can be seen towards the extremes. Without necessarily being special, the screen of Honor 10 is at least correct, even good considering the category where the smartphone competes.

There are also presets for color saturation in the display mode settings menu, as well as manual adjustment for white point. Thus, the user can adjust not only the brightness, but also the color display according to his preferences.

External sound is emitted from behind a grid on the bottom edge. It has no good quality, but no maximum volume. I'd say it's one of the weakest phones I've tested lately in terms of the intensity of the main speaker.

Things change with the 3.5mm jack. Here we have a very good quality sound, with bass and all the frequencies in place, well defined. With a good pair of headphones you will get a very good sound, at a maximum volume enough for most everyone.

Hardware, operating system and applications

The chipset around which the hardware assembly under the Honor 10 case was born is a HiSilicon Kirin 970, a chipset used on several flagship models of the parent company Huawei. Even though it is not the latest, we are still talking about a processor made by a 10nm lithography process. The processor is an octa-core with 4 cores that can go up to 2.4 GHz, on the Cortex-A73, and another 4 cores that can run at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, on the Cortex-A53.

The graphics accelerator is a Mali-G72 MP12, powerful enough to run even the toughest games in good condition, even if not in terms of quality as an Adreno would do integrated into an equivalent Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset.

RAM is 4 GB and internal storage is 128 GB, of which about 111 GB is available to the user. There is no memory card slot.

Screenshots of the CPU-Z with information about Huawei Honor 10

Equipped in this way, Honor 10 manages to run absolutely any application or game from the Play Store without any problems. However, in the demanding games or when I ran the benchmark tests, the back of the device obviously warmed up, the temperature seemed too high. Even in the upper part of the display there was an excessive increase in temperature. As a result, warning messages have appeared on the phone screen, and resource-intensive applications have been shut down so that the temperature can return to optimal parameters.

This is not the only problem, even if the next one is not so serious. We also have light hooks and a little lag that make their appearance, which is true, only rarely. These are not major issues, but they should be mentioned.

Therefore, the Android 8.1.0 Oreo operating system over which Huawei has applied the EMUI 8.1.0 interface, moves quite well most of the time, only rarely there are slight hesitations. From my point of view, the user experience does not suffer because of them.

Unfortunately, I did not finish with the negative stuff, because I got to the pre-installed applications. Again, as with the Honor 8X, we have many, far too many brought directly from the factory.

I wouldn't want to list the long list of all the pre-installed applications again, if you want to discover them you can go through them in the Honor 8X review, because they are the same. And yes, there are many, many! It is true that most can be uninstalled or disabled.

Gallery of screenshots of the Huawei Honor 10 interface:

Performance

Even though it had to pause between tests due to overheating, Honor 10 shows that it has a lot of processing power under the case. With better heat dissipation, the results may have been even better.

Connectivity

Honor 10 is a dual-sim terminal that can accommodate two nano-sim cards. There is no microSD card slot. Honor 10 knows all the 4G LTE frequencies of all the operators in our country, and the maximum speeds that can be reached in 4G are up to 1025 Mbps in download and up to 150 Mbps in upload.

On Wi-Fi we have 802.11 a / b / n / ac standards, on 2.4 and 5 GHz, Bluetooth is in version 4.2, and the location is done via A-GPS, GLONASS and BDS. Honor 10 also offers NFC, but also infrared port, which can turn your smartphone into an ad-hoc remote control for equipment such as TVs, DVD players, air conditioners, etc.

The USB Type-C port is positioned on the bottom side, next to the 3.5mm jack, speaker and main microphone. On the left is the slot for the two nano sim cards, on the top we see the IR port and the secondary microphone, and on the right are the volume and power buttons.

The fingerprint sensor is located on the bottom edge of the display, which is quite small. It has a good recognition rate, only when the finger is wet or dirty it fails. The recognition speed is also quite good, even if we saw much faster sensors, many even from Huawei.

In voice calls, Honor 10 did well. The GSM signal is well received, and the voice in the speaker on the bangs is clear and at a high volume.

Photo and video camera

Few smartphones with pretensions do not have a dual camera on the back. So Honor 10 could not have been any different here. We have two sensors for the main camera, one basic 16 Megapixel with f / 1.8, the second 24 Megapixel black and white type that wants to bring more detail in the frame. The front camera has many Megapixels, exactly 24.

The camera application on the Honor 10 is quite crowded with features. Some are immediately accessible, others you need to discover through the menu. It's nothing serious, in a few minutes you will understand what and where it is, but it seems that not everything is well thought out.

Screenshots from the Huawei Honor 10 Camera app interface:

The quality of the pictures is good, nothing more to blame. However, Honor 10 is not flagship at all. For the price area where it competes it offers good results.

Honor 10 includes the artificial intelligence part for scene recognition and application of the best settings in Photography mode. In fact, we have a boost for color saturation, for contrast and clarity, as well as for Dynamic Range. Such pictures are sure to be liked by many, even if the most demanding might prefer natural colors and an image closer to reality.

Examples of AI images stopped in the first image or turned on in the second:

In addition to AI, we also have Aperture mode, which offers an obvious separation of the subject from the background. You can choose aperture values ​​between F0.95 and F16. Everything is made of software, of course.

Examples of images with Aperture mode turned off in the first example and with it turned on in the second example:

The front camera also offers very good results. Although only in sufficient natural light do we have the details promised by the 24 Megapixels of the sensor, there are still no reasons for dissatisfaction:

On video, Honor 10 can shoot at a maximum resolution of 4K 2160p at 30fps. The quality of the clips is good in terms of level of detail and contrast, but it suffers from the representation of colors that appear a bit pale. Autofocus is not the best either, sometimes it "hunts" for no apparent reason.

4K 2160p video clip shot with Huawei Honor 10

Photo gallery taken with Huawei Honor 10:

Autonomy

The 3400 mAh battery offers decent battery life. Even good if you're not going to put the hardware to the test. With an average use you will catch without problems one day from morning to evening. On the other hand, when used heavily, Honor 10 will discharge the battery in just a few hours, even after only 3-4 hours of play.

Thus, depending on the scenario and whether or not you are going to heat up the phone (literally), autonomy can be satisfying or disastrous. What is certain is that if you buy a smartphone with a flagship processor, it is assumed that you want to put it to work. And then the autonomy will suffer, because even the battery temperature will increase beyond the limits:

In our test, when we continuously run the Unboxing Playlist on the Gadget.ro channel on YouTube, with the screen brightness at maximum, via Wi-Fi internet connection, Honor 10 discharged a full battery up to 9% of capacity after 6 hours and 12 minutes. The result is good, because YouTube does not require much processing power, so it did not appear on the heating we talked about a few chapters above, which would have consumed the battery at a really fast pace.

Honor 10 also offers SuperCharge fast charging. With the charger in the package, the battery charges up to 54% in 30 minutes. Then the charging rate obviously decreases, reaching that the battery is full only after almost 2 hours. The last 2-3 percent to 100% are the hardest to put in the battery, it takes over 20 minutes for them.

Price

Huawei Honor 10 - 1,950 lei on eMAG in the version as tested. On PCgarage.ro you can buy the version with 64 GB of internal memory for 1,500 lei.

conclusions

Honor 10 proves to be a balanced smartphone, offered at a reasonable price, given that it uses many components reserved until recently for the top of the range Huawei. However, one competitor to consider could also be from the Honor yard, I mean Honor Play, which offers the same chipset plus memory card slot and a more generous battery for less money. It costs from 1,420 lei on PCgarage.ro.

However, if you want a compact, powerful smartphone with everything you need, then Honor 10 can prove to be a very good alternative to any of last year's flagships. The price is correct according to the specifications, only you have to make some compromises. The biggest would be the phenomenon of overheating when the hardware assembly is seriously put to work.

Otherwise, I'll just add the most important pros and cons for Huawei Honor 10:

PRO

VERSUS

Categories: hardwarehuaweireview-mobile phones

Tags: HonorHuaweiHuawei Honor 10impressionsprintsreviewspecificationstestsbenchmark tests

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