It is the season of the 18:9 display and every manufacturer is updating their devices with one. The Honor View 10, which is the latest from the stables of Huawei has that and a lot more. The Honor View 10 is the good folks at Honor throwing their hat in the ring for the flagship killer tag. We spent considerable time with the device and here is our detailed review of this phone.
The Honor View 10 has a design that is classic Honor. The design is original and different and yet it is something that you would associate with Honor. The matte rear finish that effectively hides the cleverly designed and colored antenna bands is good. The shade of blue that we got the review device is now vintage Honor. The device looks distinctive and feels very good to hold. Just leaving it on the table does make people notice it. So we would chalk this device up as a win for the design department. Subtle and yet very distinctively done. It’s ultra-slim at 6.97mm and its enormous 6 in 18:9 aspect ratio display means it’s keeping up with the competition when it comes to the gaming and video consumption side of things. The fingerprint sensor has made its way from the rear onto the front, and can be found nestled underneath the display.
Honor View 10 specs
- 6in, 18:9, 1,080 x 2,160 IPS display
- 2.4GHz octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 970
- 6GB RAM
- 128GB storage
- MicroSD expansion (up to 256GB)
- Dual 16MP/20MP rear camera, both f/1.8; 13MP front camera
- Dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.2
- 3,750mAh Battery
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom edge of the phone, a feature that’s got us very happy and excited, given the number of manufacturers trying to kill it off. There’s also a USB Type-C port, that has fast-charging capabilities, NFC and dual-SIM 4G LTE capabilities, too. The phone’s secondary SIM slot can be sacrificed for a microSD card, for expanding the View 10’s 128GB storage with an additional 256GB. But given the huge internal storage on board, we really don’t see a need for that. Honor has it right here too.
In our use, the Honor View 10 is both responsive and snappy. The phone’s core specification is very similar to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro: it has a 2.4GHz octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 970 processor and 6GB of RAM. Given the fact that the Mate 10 Pro did not make it to India, this is a good thing that we get the Honor variant that is right up there with it.
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.
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.
On the rear, you’ll find dual 16- and 20-megapixel cameras, each with an f/1.8 aperture and phase detect autofocus (PDAF), a similar setup, again, to the Huawei Mate 10. There’s also a 13-megapixel camera on the front with an aperture of f/2.0. Huawei and subsequently Honor have always been on top of the dual camera game as they have been early movers in this area. The Honor View 10 aces the camera department. The beauty of the whole thing is the fact that the phone has AI baked into every feature and the camera is where it simply outdoes every other competitor. The camera can actually sense what you are trying to photograph and adjust settings accordingly. So based on whether it is a cat, a dog or an object, the images are optimized and come out looking brilliant. Here are a few pictures that we took with the phone
The now customary bokeh mode is present with the dual cameras and it does far better than any other competing device. The low light and monochrome images are also pretty neat and well done by the camera. The front 13 MP camera also does a decent job and takes good selfies. The front camera also comes with a software bokeh mode and that works pretty neatly too. Overall, the cameras are aces and that is something that Honor has mastered over the years
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 results are very good. The ability to translate signs in other languages at one shot into your language is really practical and useful.
The phone runs on EMUI 8 that is based on Android 8 (Oreo) out of the box. EMUI is a dense skin on android and not exactly light but there is a lot of work that has gone into this version and it is very spiffy and much leaner compared to other versions that we have seen earlier. The phone, the processor, the memory and the OS all come together to give a very smooth and snappy experience.
With all this packed into a pretty impressive design, it’s really nice to see a high-capacity battery in the View 10 and at 3,750mAh, technically, it’s bigger than the 3,300mAh battery found in its closest rival, the OnePlus 5T. We put it to above average use with a heavy mix of 4G, VoLTE, WiFi, Video streaming and gaming. On a single charge, the battery was able to take all this and run more than a day and a half. This is very good.
Verdict:
Honor is yet to announce the pricing of this device but we are sure that it will be competing with the OnePlus 5T. Given all that the phone packs and the thoughtful addition of AI that actually add value to the experience makes this one a must buy in our books. This is an actually smart phone that stands out among the crowd. Whatever the price is, this is a winner!
