Huawei Honor 10

Huawei presents its recent budget flagship model, Honor 10, which is looking forward to breaking the market with excellent design and power-packed performance. Priced at Rs. 24,999, this model is a good upgrade over its predecessor but fails to come toe-to-toe with P20 from the same company.

Despite having a great design, excellent AI-powered camera and robust performance, Honor 10 has its shortcomings. There is no choice to expand storage, and the mediocre battery takes off the edge from the phone. However, considering the price range, it is a good product to go for.

Huawei innovates the design of Honor 10, coming up with a bold and beautiful phone. It inherits a P20’s Twilight gradient effect and captures the shine on its back. This unconventional design may seem flashy, but it looks remarkable in real life. The 15 layers of glass in the back lets light bounce in a certain way that gives it a striking effect. It isn’t too large and fits comfortably in your hand.

Honor 10 has a 5.84-inch 19:9 display which supports FullHD. It’s bright and vibrant with minimal bezels which gives you more screen space to interact with. There is a notch, but that is small and would not pose much of a problem.

The main innovation is the redesigned fingerprint scanner which sits on the lower bezel on the front and is a design excellence.

Face unlock works fast even from different angles but fails to identify you if you have your sunglasses on, making it less impressive than iPhone X.

Honor 10 comes fitted with the new Hisilicon Kirin 970, a staple flagship of recent Huawei phones. It is capable of handling heavy games with ease, and loading times are fast even while playing graphics-heavy games. The AI-powered camera does not struggle with rapid detection, and app-switching experience is smooth. In Geekbench 4, it scored an incredible 6,570 points, though it was a tad bit lower than the 6,633 of Honor 9. However, this could be due to the 6GB RAM of Honor 9, against the 4GB of this set. The performance is geared up with a good 4GB RAM and 64GB storage capacity which gives it a reasonably good chance to compete with the other flagship competitors. However, it does not support microSD, so you have to deal with the internal storage that you receive.

Huawei does not disappoint in their camera department. Honor 10 has a Dual rear camera-set, 24MP and 16MP with the former being a monochrome shooter and the later a colour shooter. In auto mode, both sensors will take the same picture and then combine it to provide a detailed image. It has fantastic colour reproduction, and though not as good as the P20, it still sails past many competing flagship cameras.

Partnered with AI-capabilities which make it capable of identifying 22 different scenes, the Honor 10 brings photography experience to a whole new level. There are some artificial beautification effects added when AI is used, but you can easily remove it to revert to the original shot.

The 24MP selfie camera is powerful and takes high-quality pictures that can be easily used in your social media profiles. The new feature for the portrait mode is the lighting effect. You can give dramatic effects on your face, similar to the iPhone X feature. It’s especially useful with low-light photos and to remove blemishes from your face.

For a fantastic performance, Honor 10 comes with a below-average battery. It has upgraded from the 3,200 mAh of Honor 9 to the 3,400 mAh of Honor 10 but still fails to make a mark. It lasts for a day, but with heavy use, it may die out even before nighttime. While it did get a reasonable score by running a 90-minute FullHD video at full brightness with only a 16% drop of the battery, it is not a fantastic feat. Fortunately, it comes with fast charging and can go from 0 to full power in under two hours. The lack of wireless charging is a problem, but we couldn’t expect that at this price range.

Honor 10 is a definite upgrade of Honor 9, but it isn’t bringing in any groundbreaking features with it. A much better alternative is P20 which has better features than Honor 10. While the camera is impressive, it is not something to go for if you are looking to capture good images. Better top-end products are present in the market. It is recommended for people trying to get a taste of flagship phone specs, along with looking good with this shiny device in their hand.