Honor View 10 First Impressions: A Phone That Is Pretty Intelligent

Honor View 10 Rear

Honor – Huawei’s sub-brand has been going from strength to strength in the past year and it has been firmly on the back of a lot of thoughtful and feature packed devices. There is one device for everyone in the Honor range. In India Honor has been received well and their devices have had a good run so far. The latest addition to the lineup is the Honor View 10 that was recently launched in London and as the Honor V10 in China in November. Here are our first impressions of this device

The design of this phone screams premium from the minute you touch it. Accentuating the bold lines and symmetry is the fact that Honor has very boldly gone with the twin camera bump in the rear. They have gone about it in such a fashion that it actually looks pretty cool. We got the blue unit for review and just pulling the phone out in public very definitely made heads turn. There was enough interest around it even when it was lying there on a table. There is a soft transparent cover that comes with the box and that adds to the whole experience.

Honor View 10 Dual Camera

But there is more to the this phone than just the design, we will get to the points one by one here. The first thing to note here that Honor now is renowned for acing the dual camera in their phones and this one is no exception. The dual camera setup on this one is top notch by industry standards and delivers good and clear images. Low-light and monochrome pictures are handled brilliantly. The rear camera is a 16MP+20MP sensor coupling and the front is a 13 MP shooter. Together they serve all your photography needs well.

Let us now get to the hero of the phone. This phone is intelligent and can use it’s intelligence to make your life easier. Yes, it has Artificial Intelligence or AI baked into it and not just as an add-on. The AI on the phone tightly integrates with many features and adds a very useful layer to the overall workings of the phone. At the heart of this is the Kirin 970 processor built by Huawei that has it’s own Neural Processing Unit.

Kirin 970 is powered by an 8-core CPU and a new generation 12-core GPU. Built using a 10nm advanced process, the chipset packs 5.5 billion transistors into an area of only one cm². Huawei’s new flagship Kirin 970 is their first mobile AI computing platform featuring a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Compared to a quad-core Cortex-A73 CPU cluster, the Kirin 970’s new heterogeneous computing architecture delivers up to 25x the performance with 50x greater efficiency. Simply put, the Kirin 970 can perform the same AI computing tasks faster and with far less power. In a benchmark image recognition test, the Kirin 970 processed 2,000 images per minute, which was faster than other chips on the market.

Huawei Kirin 970

This adds multiple layers of smartness to the phone. The phone can keep track of your usage pattern to ensure that the apps that you use most often to manage available memory and memory use in such a way that you are never experiencing any lag or delay. The AI also makes the camera smarter. The camera can sense the subject and the lighting conditions to actually efficiently churn out images that look nothing short of professional. The camera knows the difference between plants, dogs, cats, humans and buildings and how to get great looking images all the time. The bokeh mode is also more efficient due to the AI algorithm.

One of the most interesting features of the AI on the phone is the fact that it comes with a smart translator that can translate from one language to another in real-time. The translation can be of the typed word, the spoken word or pictures that have foreign language in them. Huawei has collaborated with Microsoft for this and the initial use of this has left us impressed.

So far, The Honor View 10 is a Phone that is pretty intelligent. More details in the full review that is coming soon. Watch this space!

About Shakthi

I am a Tech Blogger, Disability Activist, Keynote Speaker, Startup Mentor and Digital Branding Consultant. Also a McKinsey Executive Panel Member. Also known as @v_shakthi on twitter. Been around Tech for two decades now.

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