Honor is a subsidiary of Huawei and its smartphones are usually packed with the same components but with a cheap price tag. Huawei Honor 10 has made a chaos in the smartphone industry when it comes to budgeted smartphones. Huawei Honor 10 may not beat Samsung Galaxy S9 or LG G7 ThinQ given that there is almost half price difference but the smartphone comes with its own perks.
The handset as a whole is really an impressive device in terms of what you are getting for the money. With it’s over satisfactory performance, reliability for day to day use and high-grade camera, it has brought tough competition in the market just like its competitor Nokia 7 Plus with almost the same price tag. The starting price of Huawei Honor 10 is $499 in US and AU $550.
Also, see its competitor Oppo Find X Review which is emerging in the market.
Huawei Honor 10 Review
Pros
- Beautiful sleek look
- Dependable performance
- High-Quality Camera
Cons
- Not waterproof
- The ultrasonic fingerprint reader is slow
- Heats up
The Design
Huawei Honor 10 is pretty similar to Huawei P20 Lite when it comes to looks, design, and internal components. There is just a difference of one thing. The price tag! The first thing that we notice is the aurora glass on the back. Huawei Honor 10 gives a really shiny eye-catching look. This is made by stacking 15 different layers of glass on top of each other which then bounce light back in different ways depending on the angle that you are looking at. Comparing Huawei Honor 10 with Huawei P20 it has same measurements except for the weight. The Honor 10 is 153g which is 12g lighter than P20. It comes in a blue and green color.
The biggest drawback is that Huawei Honor 10 is not covered with gorilla glass. It is covered instead in some kind of proprietary protective glass. It is though made with glass but it doesn’t have that premium feel that you will get more from expensive devices which is fair enough for the price.
Moreover, there is a motor in Huawei Honor 10 that buzzes when you are typing and for notification. It’s so distracting and loud that you can’t use it in a room where your partner is sleeping. It’s got really thin bezels with 19*9 aspect ratio. Huawei Honor 10 does have a notch just like iPhone X and other latest smartphones. Though many people dislike this notch; this is one of the reasons Huawei has given an option to turn it off from settings. You just have to go to settings display hit up the notch setting and you can hide a notch right away. The home button sits below the screen and there is no physical home button. However, you have an option for the display of the Home button through settings. Huawei Honor 10 is a beauty due to a curved design, thin bezels and glass make but you may need to use a cover if you want a solid grip on it.
Also, see Should you buy iPhone X or iPhone 8?
Fingerprint and Audio
There is an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor at the bottom of the display on Huawei Honor 10 which works pretty slow. Huawei could have made it a bit faster. It also does not work if your fingers are wet. Maybe they will sort it out in the future when upgrading its firmware but for now; we recommend to use a face-reader scanner instead of a fingerprint scanner. An advantage of using Kevin 97 is that its face unlock gesture is pretty quick unlike Nokia 5 2018 which has a bit slow face unlock feature. Also, the movement and typing gestures are a bit sluggish on Huawei Honor 10 when compared to Huawei P20. You will get a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a single speaker grill down the bottom which is loud enough. Putting it on full loud would be a bad option both in speakers and on headphones as the sound quality gets worse when it goes loud. It’s a bit quieter than several of the other mid-range devices, especially with notifications. Not the call volume itself but the ringing of the phone is low.
Also, see OnePlus 6 Review.
Screen, Performance, and Software
Huawei Honor 10 has an IPS LCD display of 5.84 inches with a resolution of 2280*1080 and 432ppi. The screen is colorful especially if you leave it in default vivid mode. You will get about a maximum of 500 nites brightness compared to LG G7 ThinQ which gives around 1000 nits. Huawei Honor 10 is powered by the Ki-Rin 970 chipset which is also used in P20 and Mate 10 series. You will have the option to choose from 4GB or 6GB Ram depending upon its availability and your region. Of course, a 6GB model would be recommended if you want it for some games here and there. We observed some heat problems when playing high-end games such as Fortnite. Huawei Honor 10 has 2 variants available at the moment; 64GB and 128GB with no memory card option. It did pretty good in GSMArena benchmarking tests.
Huawei Honor 10 comes with a pre-installed android 8.1 with EMU 8.1. You can downgrade it to an older version if you feel it’s slowing down your smartphone’s speed.
Also, see HTC U12 Plus Review.
Camera
Huawei Honor 10 has a dual camera with 16MP color and 24MP monochrome imager. The idea of the monochrome lens is to increase the dynamic range to provide more data to feed images. On F1.8 aperture you can do those nice depths of field effects. Also, you can control the aperture in the pro mode as well as in aperture mode. At the front of Huawei Honor 10, you have got 24-megapixel camera which is pretty decent to take selfies. This is much higher so if you are taking selfies especially in low lights they look very good.
This is an AI camera which means that if you point this camera at something it will recognize what is in the shot just like Google lens and LG G7 ThinQ. It will change the settings accordingly on Huawei Honor 10 so for example if you point it to food it is going to change the settings so that you can experience enrich details with more exposure. If you don’t like the AI implication you can turn it off as well. Moreover, there is no optical image stabilization.
Also, see Top DSLR packed Huawei P20 Pro Review.
Battery Life
Huawei Honor 10 comes with a 3400 mAh pre-installed sealed battery which lasts about a day on average use just like Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro. The glass back does not support wireless charging but it comes with a fast charging option. Huawei provides a custom solution through Supercharge. This requires a compatible charger together with a special cable. You will reach 65% from 0% in about 30 mins without any overheating on Huawei Honor 10. Of course, this is when there is no activity on the Huawei Honor 10. We were faced with some heat problems when using this charging method while playing games. The temperature rose to almost 50 degrees. Huawei Honor 10 gives about 21 hours on 3G talk time, almost 12 hours on web browsing and a total of 11 hours of playing movies and videos.
Verdict: Huawei Honor 10
Even though Huawei Honor 10 is not one of the fancy ones but it still has good looks, the latest Android software, and an amazing camera. It has got 2 competitors at the moment in this price range; Nokia 7 Plus and Moto G6 but Huawei Honor 10 reflect all the best features of Huawei P20. Still, there is no camera stabilization, no waterproof or wireless charging and the device gets heat up easily. Apart from this Huawei Honor 10 works great. It gives all the luxury which we should get according to its price. It has linked to one of the best smartphones on the market in terms of its camera, performance, look, display and battery life.
