Honor 10 Pros & Cons: Review After 2 Weeks of Use

Honor 10 is one of the latest smartphones under the Honor name (which is basically a sub-brand of Huawei). With flashy looks and packing Huawei’s fastest chipset (HiSilicon Kirin 970), dual camera with AI and the trendy notch display, the Honor 10 appears like a phone worth buying.

The question is though, is it really worth spending over 30,000 Rs? That’s what we are going to tell you in this extensive Pros and Cons review of Honor 10 after using it for 2 weeks.

A look at Honor 10 Specifications:

Aluminium frame, glass back

HiSilicon Kirin 970 processor (4 x 2.4 GHz and 4 x 1.8 GHz), 6 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, Mali-G72 MP12 GPU

Android Oreo 8.1 with EMUI 8.1

5.84-inch IPS LCD, 1080 x 2280 pixels resolution

Dual camera with 16 MP (f1.8) + 24 MP (black/white), PDAF, HDR. Front 24 MP (f2.0)

USB-C port, 3400 mAh battery with SuperCharge

Rs 32,999 (6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage)

PROS

Impressive Design & Build Quality: This is possibly the most impressive aspect of Honor 10. The phone, with the reflective and multicolored backside made of Glass, simply looks striking. It is flashy and hard to miss. The build quality is impressive as well, assisted by the Aluminium frame. Honor 10 is not too slippery to hold and given that it is not too big either, the overall grip is good enough.

Decent Camera: The main dual camera setup at the back is quite good. The 16 MP primary lens and the black-white 24 MP secondary lens do a fine job (though they work separately) in capturing some fine-looking pictures especially with the AI feature enabled. However, we suspect that the AI is just a fancy name (in this phone) and it is basically some presets to improve color and light quality depending on the scene. Overall though, the camera is good.

Below are some Honor 10 camera samples:

Battery Life: The battery life is satisfying in general. With a 3,400 mAh battery, the runtime is around 1 and a half days with normal use, which includes no video recording, some light camera use and marginal video viewing. Also, with Huawei’s SuperCharge feature, the phone can be charged up to 60%-65% in 30 minutes time while the 100% charge can be achieved in a little over 1 hour. Totally satisfying.

CONS

Performance: Unfortunately, the most important aspect in a smartphone is the one which is not so impressive in the Honor 10. While the inclusion of Kirin 970 along with 6 GB of RAM give a positive indication about its performance, the reality is not that good. Navigation on the Home screen, folders and Settings menu is quite smooth, but using social media apps is a different story. The scrolling appears heavy and is often accompanied by jerky motion.

Switching between the open apps is fine as long as there is no heavy app (like a graphic-heavy game)  involved in the action. On that note, playing a graphic-heavy game (like Asphalt 8) makes it appear like the phone is equipped with mid-range specifications. The framerate is not smooth enough and even the in-game menu navigation is consistently stutter-filled.

OTHER IMPORTANT OBSERVATIONS

Display Quality: Honor 10’s display is generally good. Colors are good with overall nice contrast. It also offers 2 color modes – Normal & Vivid, and 3 color-temperature modes – Default, Warm and Cold. It is a bit of a challenge to find the perfect combination with all these options, but we observed that the Vivid-Warm combination produces the most neutral tones in the color and the white balance. Others are either warm/reddish or bluish in application. Still, the overall color quality and the white balance can definitely be better.

CONCLUSION

At Rs 32,999, the Honor 10 should be a pretty good value for money given its decent specifications and the looks that are even better. However, at Rs 2,000 more (which is Rs 34,999), there’s the OnePlus 6 which comes with Snapdragon 845, 6 GB RAM and similarly flashy design eventually making the Honor 10 appear a bit overpriced. Still, the Honor 10 is not a bad phone at all and for anyone who is looking for a decent Honor device, the Honor 10 is here as an option.