OnePlus 6 vs Honor 10: Overall Comparison

When it comes to a smartphone like the OnePlus 6, it is a bit of a challenge to find its true competitor. And that’s because OnePlus 6 is a unique smartphone in the sense that its value for money factor is largely unmatched. It has high-end absolutely high-end specifications but it’s available at a price point that can mostly be described upper mid-range at best.

So, do you compare the OnePlus 6 to a smartphone which is a typical mid-ranger at a similar price point or do you compare it to a proper flagship which is usually available at a considerably higher price? It is a fair confusion, but we are lucky enough to find a certain handset which, we believe, is an appropriate choice for this comparison given the price and performance factors.

It is the recently launched Honor 10. And so, here is our overall comparison between OnePlus 6 and Honor 10.

ONEPLUS 6 – Specifications

Aluminium frame, Corning Gorilla Glass 5 front and back

Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor (4x 2.8 GHz Kryo 385 Gold, 4x 1.8 GHz Kryo 385 Silver), 6 GB RAM, 64 GB storage (or 8 GB RAM and 128 GB/256 GB storage), Adreno 630 GPU

Android Oreo 8.1 with Oxygen OS 5.1.5

6.28-inch Optic AMOLED display, 1080 x 2280 pixels resolution, supports sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamut

Dual camera with 16 MP (f1.7) + 20 MP (f1.7) primary and secondary lenses. OIS for the primary lens, PDAF, face detection, HDR. Front 16 MP (f2.0) with auto HDR.

Fingerprint sensor and Face unlock

USB-C port, 3,300 mAh battery with DASH charger

Rs 34,999 (6 GB RAM/64 GB storage), 39,999 (8 GB RAM/128 GB storage) and Rs 44,999 (8 GB RAM/256 GB storage Avengers Edition)

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, 64 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)

DESIGN & BUILD QUALITY

This is possibly the only aspect in which the OnePlus 6 and the Honor 10 appear to give the tightest competition to each other. Depending on one’s preference, a person can like either more than the other.

Both are beautifully finished handsets with impressive build quality. The common traits are the aluminium frame and the glass back, however, the OnePlus 6 has a mirror finish at its backside while the Honor 10, although reflective and shiny, has a different finish with multi-colored reflections when the phone is looked at different angles. Both phones look very good and it is really hard to choose between the two. Personally though, I’ll go with the OnePlus 6 because I find the mirror black finish just better and slightly cooler to look at.

Furthermore, both phones come with a USB-C type port as well as a 3.5 mm audio jack at the bottom. One more difference between the two handsets is that the Honor 10 comes with an integrated Home button right below the display. This button also performs the functionalities of the three Android function keys (Back, Home, App Switcher).

DISPLAY, SOFTWARE & UI

OnePlus 6: It comes with an Optic AMOLED display, with a notch (which can be hidden), measuring at a humongous 6.28 inches and delivers 1080p x 2280p resolution. This display also supports DCI-P3 color gamut (which is a cinema-grade color space basically) which comes with the promise of dependable color accuracy.

In reality, the display is very impressive indeed and everything looks good. We find it better than the OnePlus 5/5T which is how it should be. Especially any kind of multimedia content from the still pictures to the videos and even games, appear with vibrant colors and good saturation (even there are some instances where we feel colors become a bit oversaturated). Overall, OnePlus 6 has a very nice display.

Coming to the software and UI, there’s Android Oreo 8.1 onboard along with the Oxygen OS 5.1.5 on top of it. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about the Oxygen OS is that it is very light and more or less keeps the stock look of the Android OS intact.

Honor 10: The only similarities between the displays of the Honor 10 and the OnePlus 6 are the notch (can be turned off) and the resolution of 1080p x 2280p. From then on, things are a bit different, like the IPS LCD panel in the Honor 10 and no support for DCI-P3 (just the regular Normal/Vivid/Warm/Cold options).

While the Honor 10’s display is good in general (I don’t think there’s really a bad display nowadays at least from the lower mid-range and upwards), it is clearly not as good as the one on the OnePlus 6. But honestly, it doesn’t give us much to complain about other than it is not as sharp or (possibly) color accurate as the OnePlus 6’s AMOLED display.

Even if we put both the displays in their default settings (which means DCI-P3 disabled on the OnePlus 6), the 6 still appears a tad better than the 10.

The Honor 10, just like the OnePlus 6, comes with the Android Oreo 8.1 out of the box, but then it has the layer of Huawei’s EMUI version 8.1. It is quite a heavy customization from the company and delivers a different look and feel to the whole OS and the user interface. There are tons of Huawei-specific apps, but generally, I am personally not a fan of such custom UIs. I prefer the stock or the pure Android experience anytime.

Honor 10 tries to act like the iPhone X in some way when it comes to invoking the Notification drop-down list. The Notification list can be invoked by swiping down from top of the screen either from the left or the right side of the notch. When the user swipes down from the notch (or swipes down anywhere on the blank space on the screen), this action brings up the Search bar and the suggested apps.

Also, as we can see in the screenshot above, while we can modify and make both the Home screens look similar, the Honor 10 does not have the App Drawer as in the OnePlus 6.

PERFORMANCE – Including Gaming

This is one aspect which can literally make or break a smartphone’s position in the market. And the price/performance combination that the OnePlus 6 comes with is just too hard to compete against.

OnePlus 6, in simple terms, is quite a joy to use on daily basis. It delivers almost hiccup-free performance no matter what app is being used or action is being performed on the phone. We said almost hiccup-free because recently we observed that the apps like Facebook and the Messenger went into a freeze state. The apps had to be killed and then relaunched in order to make them function normally.

But this happened twice and we believe that these are most likely ironing issues related to the App-optimization. We believe that these kinds of things can be fixed or the occurrence of such issues will be rarer with future OS updates.

Overall, the OnePlus 6 runs in an ultra-smooth fashion and doesn’t leave anything to complain about almost all the time, which should be pleasing for any kind of a smartphone user.

Comparatively, the Honor 10 tends to run a bit heavy which is visible in the way it responds. We would like to say here that the phone is quite responsive, but running it side by side with the OnePlus 6 makes it appear slower than it is.

However, the Honor 10 struggles to run any major social media apps smoothly. For example, running any of the apps like the Facebook, Twitter or Instagram delivers a stutter-filled experience. Those are not really lags, but it feels like the apps run quite heavy thereby delivering a jerky experience while scrolling a page.

Secondly, the inclusion of a Home button below the display in the Honor 10 delivers a number of options to interact with the user interface. By default, the Home button is programmed to perform the functions of the 3 Android functions keys – Back, Home, App Switcher. Tapping on the Home button performs the Back function, holding the tap on the Home button takes the user back to the Home screen from anywhere in the UI and swiping left-right or right-left on the Home button brings up all open apps. Out of all these, invoking the App Switcher is a bit tricky because if the user swipes through the Home button too quickly then the software reads it as a tap and performs the Back function. That is why, the swipe-through-the-Home button has to be a bit slower in order to open up the App Switcher. Often, this becomes quite irritating.

Furthermore, there’s an option to enable the virtual (or on-screen) Android function keys that make the usual actions typically easy. Also, there’s one more option of a ‘pill’ or an on-screen navigation bar which mimics the Home button in its functionality. Using either of these options, the actual Home button performs just a tap function which takes the user to the Home screen.

Gaming – In our extensive one-week review of the OnePlus 6, we mentioned that we were left a bit unsatisfied with its gaming performance. It is because our expectations are probably quite high considering that there’s the Snapdragon 845 onboard with the integrated Adreno 630 GPU. The gaming experience just isn’t super smooth that we have been expecting it to be. It is acceptable, at best, but not quite up there. Again, like we mentioned in the phone’s review, we have seen similar performance from the phones with mid-range specifications so OnePlus 6’s gaming performance is definitely underwhelming.

The Honor 10 also isn’t any better either. Its Kirin 970 processor along with Mali-G72 MP12 GPU doesn’t deliver any praise-worthy gaming performance. It is bit of a jerky experience even though we haven’t really experience any proper lags on it.

All in all, both phones are a bit disappointing in gaming with respect to their specifications.

CAMERA

OnePlus 6: Dual camera with 16 MP (f1.7) + 20 MP (f1.7) primary and secondary lenses. OIS for the primary lens, PDAF, face detection, HDR. Front 16 MP (f2.0) with auto HDR.

Honor 10: Dual camera with 16 MP (f1.8) + 24 MP (black/white), PDAF, HDR. Front 24 MP (f2.0). The main camera also gets AI assistance which is meant to enhance the colors and the white balance depending on the kind of scene being shot.

Below are a few camera samples from OnePlus 6:

Below are a few camera samples from Honor 10:

Our observations are that the OnePlus 6 camera leaves a lot to desire and cannot compete with other flagships from Apple, Samsung and Google (Pixel 2/2 XL) to name a few. Colors are generally acceptable at best but they often appear a bit lifeless. There’s a clear need to improve the saturation and the accuracy. HDR samples are a bit nosier but they do reveal slightly more detail. Overall, the camera is nothing spectacular by today’s smartphone standards.

Coming to the Honor 10’s camera, the while balance is generally better and tends to swing towards better realism than what the OnePlus 6 can manage, but it is still not accurate all the time. Honor 10’s camera often gets confused with the outcome of the white balance especially in shadowy/light mixed conditions. However, it reveals overall better detail which is usually noticeable in all samples making the colors look better as well. Also, the enabling the AI tends to improve the color saturation and in some way, it also slightly works like HDR. Overall, AI enabled pictures look livelier compared to their normal versions. Lastly, there’s a Portrait mode as well as an Aperture mode. The Portrait mode delivers the bokeh effect just like what we can acquire in the default autofocus by closing in on the subject so we do not understand the need of it. The Aperture mode tends to emulate the Bokeh effect but it is not impressive as the edges of the subject tend to soften up a bit and appears to mix with the blurry background.

Still, we feel that the Honor 10’s camera is a little bit better here.

BATTERY LIFE

OnePlus 6 and Honor 10 both have closely matched batteries in terms of ‘mAh’ – OnePlus 6 gets 3,300 mAh battery while the Honor 10 gets 3,400 mAh battery. Furthermore, the OnePlus 6’s battery comes with the super-impressive DASH charger, at the same time, the Honor 10’s battery comes with Huawei’s SuperCharge tech.

OnePlus’s DASH charger can charge the phone to up to 60% in 30 minutes while the sprint to 100% takes nearly 1 hour, which is very impressive and helpful indeed. The good thing is, Huawei’s SuperCharge also delivers similar kind of a performance taking the Honor 10 up to 65% in 30 minutes while the 100% charge comes up in a little over 1 hour. The charging times of both phones leave nothing more to be desired for us.

The battery life is more or less equally impressive with both phones living up to 1 and a half days in normal usage (while avoiding heavy camera usage with only nominal video watching). The runtime is drastically reduced when the usage is heavier which depends on person to person.

CONCLUSION

Through this comparison, we see that the Honor 10 tries its best but can’t really compete with the OnePlus 6 when it comes to the raw horsepower. Between the two, the OnePlus 6 is simply incomparable in all kinds of tasks that do not involve clicking a picture. It is very responsive, fast and remains smooth for the most part barring the random freezes with a couple of social media apps we experienced. The gaming and the camera performance are two things that require almost significant improvements in order to make the OnePlus 6 a truly remarkable smartphone.

The Honor 10, on the other hand, is a decent device in itself. The display is nice and the phone is compact enough even with the 5.8-inch screen size. However, the EMUI is not really drool-worthy in any way and tends to make the stock OS a bit heavy, which is occasionally visible in the normal usage. However, Honor 10 is slightly better in the camera performance and delivers nice images especially with the AI mode enabled.

If you are someone who is too much invested in smartphone photography then the OnePlus 6 is probably not the right handset for you at the moment. However, OnePlus 6 is clearly the better handset in every other aspect and one of the best smartphones to own, generally speaking.

At Rs 34,999 (6 GB RAM / 64 GB storage), the OnePlus 6 delivers incomparable price/performance factor powered by the Snapdragon 845. At the same time, the Honor 10 is priced at Rs 32,999 (for 6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage). We are currently unsure of the Honor 10’s price with the 64 GB storage variant as it is not showing on Honor India website, but we would guess that it could be 3k-4k Rs cheaper than the 128 GB variant. Still, the OnePlus 6 remains the better handset and is the one to own.

Let us know in the comment section below which one of the two – OnePlus 6 and Honor 10 – you would like to own and why.