During testing, Honor 10 established itself as a top-level device without obvious shortcomings at a reasonable cost. Its design and performance are cool, and the dual camera, powered by artificial intelligence, takes decent photos. Solid, although not phenomenal, is the battery life. The cost, depending on the amount of built-in memory, ranges from 26,990 to 29,990 rubles - this is an attractive price for the quality offered.
Huawei P20 says hello
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: upon external examination, it quickly becomes clear that Honor 10 has adopted some of the design features of the Huawei P20. But this is not too surprising: after all, Honor is a subsidiary of Huawei. The glass body and aluminum frame of Honor 10 look very elegant. For those who like something brighter, the manufacturer came up with Shimmering Green and Shimmering Blue - inspired by the lights of the Northern Lights, Honor reproduces interesting color shifts on the back of the case. Honor 10 is also available in classic black and silver options.
Let's not hide it: Honor 10 is well made - its corners are nicely rounded, and its 154 grams of weight fit well in the hand. The double camera, which protrudes noticeably beyond the dimensions of the case, is somewhat disturbing, since if the device is lying on a table, it is not stable. There is no IP certification here - that is, Honor’s new flagship is not waterproof.
Honor 10 with a glass body looks elegant and boasts excellent workmanship
Wireless chargers compatible with modules for Honor
Not all Honor smartphones support wireless charging modules. Therefore, in order not to make a mistake in your choice, below is a list of phones that have the ability to use Qi technology through special adapters.
| Generation Qi | The lineup |
| Seventh | Honor 7C Honor 7A Pro Honor 7C Pro |
| Eighth | Honor 8A Honor 8C Honor 8X Honor 8X Max |
| Ninth | Honor 9 Honor 9 Lite |
| Tenth | Honor 10 Honor 10i Honor 10 Lite Honor 10 Premium |
As well as individual models such as Honor Play and Honor View 20. And a little about some of these models.
Honor View 20
Advantages of Honor V 20:
- wireless charging support;
- the quality of the pictures is at a high level;
- powerful proprietary processor;
- capacitive battery.
This model has a balanced price-quality ratio.
Wireless charging module
Honor 10 Lite
Positive aspects: ergonomic design, unlocking using a face scanner, capacitive battery, high-resolution matrix.
The processor was developed by Huawei, but this does not prevent it from being productive and supporting many modern games. It costs a little less than the Honor V 20, but is almost as good in terms of parameters.
Honor Play
This model is famous among fans of mobile toys. The following features distinguish it from others:
- video processor overclocking system;
- built-in remote control for controlling household appliances;
- clear audio sound;
- capacious battery.
Honor 10 display follows the Notch trend
Honor 10 has a 5.84-inch display in 19:9 format with a high resolution of 2280x1080 pixels (432 ppi). Honor uses an LC display, which we liked because it displays particularly rich colors. According to our tests, it has 136 percent coverage of the sRGB color space, which is almost on par with OLED displays. But you can't count on the perfect display of blacks that the Huawei P20 offers. However, thanks to a maximum brightness of almost 490 cd/m2, the Honor 10 screen remains highly readable even in bright sunlight.
The screen is almost frameless and, in accordance with modern trends, has a notch at the top, which is called “Notch”. As a result, the display covers 80 percent of the area of the front side of the case with the image, that is, it uses it with virtually no loss. In addition to several sensors, the notch houses an earpiece and a front camera with an extremely high 24-megapixel resolution. By the way, it can also be used to unlock a smartphone through the facial recognition function. Alternatively, you can use the fingerprint scanner, which responds accurately and quickly.
Practical: You can deactivate the Notch display if you wish. In this case, the areas to the left and right of the notch are filled with black.
Honor 10's 5.84-inch display has convincing color saturation
What to do if your Huawei or Honor phone is not charging
The problem with charging a Huawei or Honor smartphone can be caused by the following main reasons :
- the electricity in the network is turned off;
- faulty socket;
- the charger or cable is damaged;
- damage to the micro USB or USB-C socket on the device itself;
- the current-carrying cable or contacts have failed;
- malfunction of the device;
- presence of viruses;
- The battery has failed.
If you are faced with such a problem and do not know what to do if your smartphone does not charge, then it is recommended to take the faulty device to a service center. But before that, check if the charge is coming from another charger.
We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the proprietary Huawei HiCare application, with which you can contact the official support service.
Decent battery life, excellent performance
The battery has a high capacity of 3400 mAh. With it, the Honor 10 was able to achieve a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes in our demanding battery life test with the display always on. For comparison, the Huawei P20 has a smaller battery, but almost reached the 10 hour mark. For normal, everyday use this should not be a problem. You will find more durable devices, the battery life of which sometimes reaches 13 hours or more, in our corresponding rating.
During testing, the smartphone charged quickly. More precisely, through the included USB Typ-C power supply for fast charging with a power of 22.5 W, the battery replenished its energy reserves in 116 minutes.
The strength of the Honor 10 is its fast pace. The manufacturer uses Huawei's current best processor, called HiSilicon Kirin 970. It is about as fast as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835. With this development from Huawei, web surfing can truly be a pleasure: even when working with heavy websites and applications, we did not notice any restrictions during our testing tests. Even in Split Screen mode, two applications worked in parallel, maintaining speed and elasticity.
Depending on your choice, Honor 10 can be equipped with 4 or 6 GB of RAM and built-in storage capacity of 64 or 128 GB. Subsequent expansion of the built-in memory, unfortunately, is not possible: although the Honor 10 has a slot for accommodating two Nano-SIM cards, it does not have a slot for a Micro-SD memory card. In the case of the device we tested, we are talking about a 128 GB variant, where approximately 115 GB remain available for free use.
Honor installs the latest Android 8.1 Oreo operating system here, which works in combination with the EMUI 8.1 user interface developed by Huawei.
Surfing the web with Honor 10 is a pleasure: the Kirin 970 processor ensures a fast pace of work
Fast charging and operating time of Honor 20 Pro are at a decent level
The manufacturer claims support for fast charging up to 25 W, for which the supplied power supply and cable that can withstand increased current will be useful. Namely, due to the higher current, which reaches 4.59 Amperes, the charging time decreases, while the voltage remains at the standard level of 5 Volts or even slightly lower.
If you look at the charging graph, it displays a maximum voltage of 21.8 W, although only in the first minutes of charging, after which the figures drop noticeably. But this did not stop the smartphone from charging up to 48% in 30 minutes and up to 87% in 1 hour. It took almost two hours to fully charge, although the smartphone's percentage indicator will display the 100% figure sooner.
What about autonomy? When playing HD video in an MX player with a screen brightness of 150 nits, the battery was discharged in 13 hours and 50 minutes, which is a very good indicator. A more difficult test, which consists of playing Fortnite at maximum graphics settings, gives just over 5 hours of work. The results of synthetic autonomy tests can be found below.
AI camera but not Leica certified
Honor 10 has a dual camera located on the back of the body, but unlike the P20 series, it does not have Leica certification. The photo quality of this camera is not bad, although it cannot compare with top devices in this category, for example, the HTC U11, especially in poor lighting conditions. The camera has two matrices: 16-megapixel color and 24-megapixel black and white. The f/1.8 aperture provides sufficient light flow to the sensors. In daylight, we can consider the Honor 10's images to be convincing, but those taken at dusk seem somewhat noisy. In addition, noise reduction algorithms “eat up” a lot of details and structures. Hair and yarn, for example, merge into one surface.
However, this should not be the case at all: the manufacturer in Honor 10 uses the so-called “AI camera” (with artificial intelligence). AI mode recognizes objects and scenarios, adapting camera settings to the scenes being captured (such as nature, food, portraits) to improve image quality, such as improving color saturation.
The optical image stabilizer will have to be abandoned here, and accordingly, the risk of blurry photographs becomes higher. However, it is possible to take advantage of intelligent image stabilization at the software level. The camera detects moving objects and activates Quick Capture mode to capture the scene as clearly as possible.
Honor 10's AI camera recognizes objects and adapts image settings depending on the scene being captured
Good equipment
Fans of cable headphones can rejoice at the presence of a classic audio jack - currently something taken for granted, unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Alternatively, Bluetooth 4.2 is available for use. According to the results of tests, we find the mono speaker of Honor 10 a little weak: Huawei P20 plays noticeably louder. A nice bonus: thanks to the infrared transmitter located on the top side of the housing, you can control, for example, your home TV using your smartphone.
There is also a Dual-SIM slot on board, which allows you to use two mobile networks simultaneously. At the same time, 4G, and with it Voice-over-LTE to improve communication quality, is available on both cards. However, you will have to forget about the wireless charging function. In addition, the USB Typ-C connector transfers data using the slow 2.0 standard.
As already mentioned, sales of Honor 10 in Russia start today, May 22, at 11 a.m., but pre-orders were possible a week ago. When you pre-order, you can receive Honor Monster 2 headphones, an Honor Band 3 fitness tracker, as well as coupons from Delivery Club and IVI as a gift.
Dual-SIM slot allows you to simultaneously log in to two mobile networks
The sound of Honor 20 Pro is where we let you down
The main speaker has a good volume, but there is no desire to listen to music through it. The sound lacks volume, but the sound is noticeably distorted. The conversational speaker sounds much more pleasant during dialogues with interlocutors.
Unfortunately, the Honor 20 Pro does not have a 3.5 mm jack - instead they offer to use Type-C for wired headsets, fortunately, the package includes a corresponding adapter. The sound in the headphones is high-quality and loud, and wireless headsets support aptX and aptX HD codecs.
At the end, we should cover some issues regarding the smartphone.
Characteristics and test results of Honor 10 128GB
| Price-quality ratio | 83 |
| OS during testing | Android 8.1 |
| Weight | 154 g. |
| Height x width | 150 x 72 mm; |
| Thickness | 9.2 mm; |
| Screen: diagonal | 5.8 inches |
| Screen: size in mm | 63 x 134 mm; |
| Screen: type | LCD |
| Screen: resolution | 1,080 x 2,280 pixels |
| Screen: Dot Density | 433 ppi |
| Screen: max. brightness | 489.3 cd/m² |
| Screen: staggered contrast in a dark room | 154 :1 |
| Download speed: PDF 5 MB via WLAN | 15.0 s |
| Download speed: chip.de test chart via WLAN | 6.9 s |
| CPU | HiSilicon Kirin 970 |
| CPU frequency | 2.400 MHz |
| Number of CPU cores | 4+4 |
| RAM capacity | 4 GB |
| Battery: capacity | 3.400 mAh |
| Battery: surfing time | 9:24 h:min |
| Battery: charging time | 1:56 h:min |
| Fast charging function | Yes |
| Battery: discharging time/charging time | 4,9 |
| Wireless charging function | — |
| WLAN | 802.11n, ac |
| VoLTE | Yes |
| LTE: frequencies | 800, 1.800, 2.600 MHz |
| LTE: speed | up to 400 Mbit/s |
| Camera: resolution | 15.9 megapixels |
| Camera: measured resolution | 1,822 line pairs |
| Camera: expert assessment of image quality | Fine |
| Camera: VN1 noise | 2.0 VN1 |
| Camera: Optical Image Stabilizer | — |
| Camera: autofocus | Yes |
| Video resolution | 3.840 x 2.160 pixels |
| Front camera: resolution | 23.8 megapixels |
| LED indicator | multicolor |
| SIM card type | Nano-SIM |
| Dual SIM | Yes |
| Protection against dust and moisture (IP certificate) | — |
| Biometric unlocking | fingerprint sensor, face recognition |
| User accessible memory | 128 GB |
| Free memory | 113.0 GB |
| Memory card slot | — |
| USB connector | Type-C-USB 2.0 |
| Bluetooth | 4.2 |
| NFC | Yes |
| Headphone output | 3.5mm socket |
| SAR | 0.79 W/kg |
| Firmware version during testing | 8.1.0.101 |
| Test date | 2018-05-14 |
Photo: CHIP, manufacturing company
