It seems that 2021 will be the most successful year for Huawei in the Russian market. It not only managed to become the leader in smartphone sales in Russia, displacing the 10-year-old leader Samsung from first place, but also released an excellent (without exaggeration) line of Huawei P20 smartphones, including the flagship Huawei P20 Pro, which is the best camera phone today .
But today we will talk about a smartphone from another family, produced under the Honor brand. It is interesting because in it Huawei usually uses the developments and technologies of older models, while, as they say, “within the budget.” This was the case, for example, with Honor 9: the smartphone turned out to be very relevant and at the same time inexpensive. Our today's hero, Honor 10, is also in many ways similar to the older models from the Huawei P20 line, and in some ways it’s a surprise! - even surpasses them. At the same time, it remains very inexpensive for a device with such characteristics.
Let's see what Honor 10 has more advantages or disadvantages.
What did you like about Honor 10?
The appearance is just bomb!
Without a doubt, this is one of the most spectacular smartphones of the year. You can talk as much as you like about how glass is impractical (especially if there is no support for wireless charging), but how beautiful it is, especially in combination with a gradient. However, even in the icy gray color the smartphone looks very, very good. But I wasn't impressed with the black color.
The same Honor 10, but from a different angle, looks completely different
By the way, thanks largely to the gradient, Honor 10 does not suffer so much from the eternal curse of glass smartphones - instant staining, which kills all the beauty in the bud. Even fingerprints on its body are not so obvious.
Fits in your hand - perfect
The screen of Honor 10 is quite large - 5.84 inches, but this does not cause any inconvenience. The smartphone fits perfectly in the hand and - what is important - does not slip (minus another curse of glass).
As for the “dead zones”: if you hold the smartphone in your right hand, it was not easy for me with my small hand to reach the call button in the lower right corner.
The connectors are fine
Like any decent smartphone in 2021, Honor 10 received a USB Type-C connector, but at the same time - hurray! — they didn’t remove the 3.5 mm headphone jack (but let me remind you that the older Huawei P20 line no longer has it). However, this is where the attraction of unheard-of generosity ends; the headphones themselves are not included.
The screen is quite good
Honor 10 received an LTPS display. Of course, this is not AMOLED, so don’t expect “correct black” and high contrast. But the display does not cause irritation, except on a bright sunny day, when the display noticeably goes blind even with the brightness slider turned up to maximum.
Natural colors are also a plus; unlike many “Chinese” ones, the display on Honor 10 is “warm” and does not turn blue.
By the way, in terms of display characteristics, Honor 10 is slightly superior to the flagship Huawei P20 - the Honor’s resolution is 2280×1080, the number of pixels per inch is 432, while the P20 has 1080×2224 and 428 PPI. A trifle, but nice.
Again, as is fashionable in 2018, Honor 10 received a cutout at the top of the screen. The cutout itself looks quite neat. If you don’t like it, you can replace it in the screen settings with the usual dark stripe, although the cutout on the protective film still won’t let you completely forget about it.
Performance is better than the flagship
Another parameter in which Honor 10 is not only not inferior to flagships, but even superior to them is hardware. Like the Huawei P20 line, it uses an eight-core Kirin 970 with a neural module; you can read more about it here. And the Honor 10 has no less RAM than the Huawei P20 - 4 GB.
It is not surprising that in synthetic tests Honor 10 performs as well as possible, leaving behind not only many of its classmates, but also the flagships of other brands.
Geekbench 4 and AnTuTu test results for Honor 10
Geekbench 4 and AnTuTu test results for Nokia 7 Plus
Geekbench 4 and AnTuTu test results for Meizu 15 Plus
In real, not synthetic, reality, the smartphone also does not disappoint: after two months of active use, Honor 10 showed its best side: no slowdowns, no lags, no sudden reboots. To the proprietary firmware - Honor 10, let me remind you, runs Android 8.1. + EMUI 8.1 - there were no complaints either, everything is convenient and intuitive.
Battery is excellent
What I want to praise and praise Honor 10 for is charging and battery. The smartphone charges fantastically quickly - 64% in half an hour, 94% in an hour. And it holds a charge for a long time, especially if you don’t turn the brightness slider all the way up.
The camera does not disappoint
The camera, of course, is the key difference between Honor 10 and the flagships of the Honor family. Here you, of course, will not find three cameras or a proud Leica logo. But you will find an intelligent assistant that analyzes the frame and selects the optimal shooting mode. The same assistant is used in the Huawei P20 Pro camera phone, but Honor has even more plot scenarios, including very exotic ones.
Does artificial intelligence help? In general, yes. Photos taken with AI enabled tend to be more detailed, brighter (sometimes too vibrant), and more visually interesting.
This photo and subsequent ones can be seen in the original by simply clicking on the photo
The shot was taken without the use of AI...
... and a shot taken with the participation of “artificial intelligence”. The colors are brighter and there are more details.
Another feature that is well known to owners of Huawei and Honor smartphones is the ability to change the focus and sharpness of a frame taken in the “Aperture” mode. Sometimes this helps out a lot.
Overall, the shooting quality of the Honor 10 does not disappoint. It reproduces colors well, does not lose detail, and copes well even when shooting in low light conditions.
Screen
Despite the fact that Honor 10 is an analogue of Huawei P20, the screen of the “ten” is taken from another model, P20 Lite. It is made using IPS technology, 5.84″ diagonal (0.04 inches larger than the P20), 19:9 aspect ratio, and has a “monobrow” (which can be hidden in the settings by adding black stripes on the sides). Screen resolution 1080×2280 pixels, pixel density ~423 PPI.
Screen brightness varies from 2 to 400 cd/m². The maximum brightness value is enough to make out the information on the display on a sunny day, but in direct sunlight the screen, of course, fades a lot. The color gamut in Vivid mode is very large, the picture is very rich and saturated, but with a coldish tint - the color temperature of Honor 10 is raised to ~7700K by default. However, this can be easily fixed, and in one of two ways - either switch from the “default” mode to “warm” in the “screen - color mode and temperature” menu, or activate “eye protection” in the sub-item of the same name and then use the slider Smoothly adjust the color temperature to your liking.
Overall, it’s a good, fairly bright screen with very decent image contrast, rich, pure colors, wide viewing angles and deep blacks, like for IPS.
What didn't you like about Honor 10?
Unfortunately, during operation, the Honor 10 also revealed shortcomings, and serious ones.
Unstable housing coating
Just a few weeks after use, it turned out that the smartphone is not resistant to external damage. First - traditionally for Honor - the coating peeled off from the rim around the main camera, then abrasions were found on the lower end of the case. A couple of small scratches appeared on the glass back cover.
Performance and OS
The Kirin 710 processor is responsible for the performance of Honor 10i. This is a 12-nanometer eight-core chipset operating at a clock frequency of 1.7-2.2 GHz. The processor was introduced in mid-2021 and has since been used in a good dozen different smartphones from Huawei/Honor, having proven itself to be the best. The 10i has 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage, of which 111 GB is available to the user. The storage can be expanded with a MicroSD card up to 512 GB.
Despite the modest results in synthetic tests, where the Kirin 710 ranks between the Snapdragon 636 and 670, in real use there are no complaints about the performance of the smartphone. Due to good optimization of EMUI, the system works quickly and smoothly, applications launch quickly and are normally kept in the background (in the settings you can prohibit unloading the necessary software from RAM). No problems were found with the correct display of notifications from applications.
The Honor 10i feels quite confident in games. Heavy projects like Asphalt 9, WoT and PUBG with stable FPS are comfortable to play on medium graphics settings, you can also use high ones, but after 30-40 minutes drops in frame rate begin. The maximum heating of the case under load does not exceed 42 degrees. It makes no sense to consider the 10i as a gaming device; for the same money there are much more powerful smartphones (Pocophone F1), but it allows you to while away an extra minute in games.
Not with recognition either, thank God.
Honor 10 inherited from its older brothers the P20 line and a fingerprint scanner - it is built into the Home button and is located under the glass. And like older models, the scanner is very problematic: it does not work too quickly and not too accurately. For recognition to fail, you just need to move your finger a little.
After about a week of use, you adapt to this, getting used to immediately positioning your finger so as to please the capricious sensor, and Huawei, for its part, has somewhat corrected the situation in the update, but nevertheless, the problem has not been completely solved, and this is frustrating.
Not everything is in order with facial recognition: if you put on glasses, find yourself in low light conditions, or take the smartphone at a slight angle, Honor 10 makes mistakes again.
Battery
According to the manufacturer, Honor 10 has:
- battery capacity 3400 mAh;
- standby time 120 hours;
- Talk time 25 hours.
In fact, the battery charge lasts for about a day (14 hours) in active use: YouTube, Instagram, processing applications, camera, books, conversations.
honor 10 photo
If you enable smart screen resolution in the settings, you can save 10 percent of the charge in standby mode.
The advantage of Honor 10 is SuperCharge fast charging. Manufactured using technology that increases standard voltage and current, the device charges your smartphone as quickly and safely as possible.
Huawei SuperCharge was named the fastest charging, ahead of OnePlus Dash Charge, Motorola Turbo Charge and others. In 73 minutes it charges a 3,400 mAh battery, according to research, and according to personal observations, Honor 10 rises from 25% to 100% in 50 minutes.
The sound is very average
Honor 10 received a single, but loud speaker and a 32-bit AK4376A DAC. Don't expect miracles - the sound, although loud, is flat even to my inexperienced ears. What’s bad is that the customization options are also sparse: the set of Huawei Hisense audio effects is quite limited and, moreover, is activated only when headphones are connected.
But Honor 10 has another interesting feature - party mode, which allows you to synchronize music on several smartphones via Wi-Fi, NFC or by scanning a QR code.
And as usual, we’ll answer a few questions about Honor 10.
Hardware platform
Describing the capabilities of Honor 10 is quite difficult. The reason is simple: the phone has a really powerful processor platform. The device does not experience problems with any of the applications. The performance level of the central processor is comparable to the top Snapdragon 835 . It is not inferior to the Samsung development, Exynos 9 8895 Octa CPU. The computing power of the hardware platform is quite fully described by the synthetic 3DMark test, which claims that the Honor 10 can surpass 95% of other phones.
A separate neural computing processor primarily deals with fractal transformations. The use of such a module allows you to extremely quickly analyze graphic data, recognize fingerprints, faces in a panorama, and the nature of the image in the field of view of cameras. Therefore, Honor 10 practically does not think about any of these tasks.
Users especially note the high performance of the digital modem. At the same time, the smartphone offers an extended mode for working with data: both cards can be used simultaneously, which makes using the Internet even more convenient and faster.
Honor 10 Specifications:
- OS: Android 8.1;
- processor: HUAWEI Kirin, 4×Cortex A73 2.36 GHz + 4×Cortex A53 1.8 GHz;
- RAM: 4 GB;
- built-in memory: 64 or 128 GB;
- Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g/n, 2.4 GHz/ 802.11 a/n/ac, 5 GHz
- Bluetooth: BT4.2, BLE, aptX and aptX HD, LHDC;
- LTE frequencies: LTE FDD Band 1/3/5/7/8/19/20
- screen: 5.84 inches, LTPS, 2280×1080 pixels, 432 ppi;
- main camera: 16 MP (f/1.8) and 24 MP (f/1.6), dual, flash, autofocus, video recording up to UHD 4K;
- front camera: 24 MP f/2.0;
- slot tray configuration: two Nano-Sim;
- memory card: not supported;
- navigation: GPS/BDS/GLONASS;
- sensors: NFC, fingerprint sensor, face scanner;
- battery: 3400 mAh;
- wireless charging: no;
- fast charging: supported;
- body: aluminosilicate glass;
- dimensions: 149.6 x 71.2 x 7.7 mm
- body colors: midnight black, ice grey, shimmering green, shimmering blue
- Honor 10 price: from 26,990 rubles
