Honor always releases multiples of phones in a year. The Chinese manufacturer will release its first smartphone of the year – Honor 10 Lite on 15th January. This smartphone has a stylish design and the 24 megapixel front camera makes the device a good contender in the budget segment. Honor 10 Lite also has 6.21 inch Full HD+ display, an octa-core Kirin 710 processor, and dual rear camera. As usual this smartphone has an attractive design. We received the Midnight Black version for review. We have been using the same for some time and here is our review.
The looks of Honor 10 Lite are very good with an all plastic body with good shining finish. The smartphone attracts fingerprints a lot. The two rear facing cameras present protrude slightly from the back, but the smartphone comes with a transparent cover so that you can use them. The device also has a rear mounted fingerprint sensor which is able to unlock the device very fast. The smartphone sits comfortably in our hands and the fingerprint sensor is easy to reach.
A 3.5mm audio jack, microUSB port and speaker are present on the bottom of the smartphone while the top of the smartphone has hybrid SIM tray. If you need more storage space you can sacrifice the secondary SIM slot for a microSD card. You can get an additional 512GB of space on top of the 64GB present when you use a microSD card. The right side of the device houses volume rockers and the power button.
The display of Honor 10 Lite is a 6.21 inch IPS display which has a resolution of 1,080 x 2,340 (FHD+) and 415 Pixels per inch. We are getting an aspect ratio of 19.5:9, which is down to the phone’s notch. We can also switch off the notch using the smartphone’s display settings. The Honor 10 Lite has dewdrop notch display.
There are two color modes in the screen – Normal and Vivid. You can set them according to your preferences. On either modes the screen display looks crisp and it is good in all viewing angles. On bright sunlight also, the display is quite visible.
Honor 10 Lite comes with a battery capacity of 3400mAh. The battery is non-removable, but it does not support fast charging. The battery lasts for approximately a day which is quite good.
Honor 10 Lite comes with the latest Android 9.0 Pie with its latest EMUI 9.0. There is some bloatware in the device which can be uninstalled. When we unlock the smartphone we can see all the pre-installed apps. There is an option to toggle between the standard layout or with Home screen and App drawer. When we swipe to the right from the home screen we can see the Google Feed and when we swipe downwards we can search in the app library. The UI is unresponsive sometimes. This slightly annoying. Honor will do will to overhaul the UI and make it light.
The fingerprint reader performs really well as it unlocks the device faster. The face unlock feature also works well by unlocking the device fast.
The smartphone comes with a 2.2GHz octa-core processor with 4x Cortex-A73 and HiSilicon Kirin 710 processor and 4GB of RAM. This is a mid-range processor which is brought to the budget segment. The device comes with an internal memory of 64GB which can be expanded to 512GB.
As far as the camera is concerned, the Honor 10 Lite comes with 13+2 megapixel camera on the rear and a 24 megapixel selfie camera. In the rear camera the 2MP acts as a depth sensor and the 13MP camera has an aperture of f/1.8 and has Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF). The camera comes with artificial intelligence which you can switch off. The camera produced some good shots but the time taken to take a picture is little long. Some of the photos taken are noisy. Some of the photos are grainy. The night mode in the camera does not produce good images. We tried taking pictures with the night mode and felt that it was very disappointing. The selfie camera takes good images with its 24 megapixel camera. We took selfies in different scenarios like indoors and outdoors. For our surprise, the selfies came amazingly well.
Here are some of the pictures taken with Honor 10 Lite.
The loudspeaker is present at the bottom and produces more sound even with a single grill present. Even in crowded places we can hear the sound very clearly when it rings. The call quality was good and the sound was very loud and crisp. 4G LTE support is good and the Jio SIM works well.
We tried gaming with Honor 10 Lite. The smartphone performed well with simple games. But when we tried using PUBG and Asphalt we could see lots of frame drops in high level, at mid-level it okay and given the specs and the fact that Honor will price it well, that doesn’t seem to be a major concern.
Verdict
By the looks of the Honor 10 Lite we think that this will be a budget phone. The camera is quite decent and the selfies taken are quite impressive. The battery of 3400mAh also runs for a day which is quite good. Even though the device is made of plastic, it gives a premium look. Honorable entry into 2019 by honor with a Solid device that has good specs.
