Tech and Telecom

Honor 10 Checks All The Right Boxes at Just The Right Price {Review]

The Honor brand has always been associated with manufacturing budget smartphones and there aren’t many expectations for their flagship offerings. Even in Pakistan, their success is thanks to their budget offerings which proved to be a huge success in the market.

Today we have with us the Honor 10. It’s a flagship and on paper, it comes with some impressive specifications and design. What sets the Honor 10 apart is the price tag which is kept competitively low.

Video Review (Urdu)

Design and Display

The design of the Honor 10 takes some cues from the Huawei P20 Pro. The color we had is called the Phantom Blue and it shifts colors between blue and purple depending on the angle you’re looking from. In short, the Honor 10 possesses one of the best and eye-catching design in the market today and definitely grabs your attention.

One of the most interesting thing on the Honor 10 was its fingerprint scanner. Huawei/Honor’s most conventional capacitive fingerprint scanners were quite fast and worked well. However, the Honor 10 features a new ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. The advantages that come with an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner includes being placed under a thin layer of glass, as is the case with the Honor 10. It’s also supposed to very fast and much more secure than a conventional one.

The fingerprint scanner’s performance on the Honor 10, however, was a hit or miss. Most of the time it did recognize my finger and opened instantly and sometimes it refused to the identify my fingerprint. Enrolling a new fingerprint was also just as frustrating.


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Using fingerprint scanners to unlock a phone is my go-to method with most of the devices out there but with the Honor 10, I had to set up face unlock just so I wouldn’t have to use the fingerprint scanner often.

On the back, you’ll find the dual cameras, an LED flash, and Honor branding. On the right side, you’ll find the power button, the bottom houses the volume rocker and on the top, you have the IR blaster and secondary microphone.

The front has the 5.84″ panel with a resolution of 1080 x 2280 (Full HD+) and an aspect ratio of 19:9.

A 1080p resolution is not what you’d expect from a flagship, but that’s what you get with the Honor 10. The display itself is not at all bad. Colors are sharp and vivid, contrast is good. Viewing angles are also not bad, given that it is an IPS LCD panel. Brightness levels were okay too with good visibility in direct sunlight.

Hardware and Performance

Honor decided to not skimp on the processing power of the Honor 10 which is a good thing. So, with the Honor 10, you get the HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset along with 4GB of RAM and 64/128 GB internal storage.

The performance was snappy, to say the least. Applications opened and closed in milliseconds and general navigation throughout the UI was smooth. Gaming was also a treat on the Honor 10 as the frame rate was high and stable.

Multitasking was also fine most of the time though I would’ve loved to see a 6 GB RAM option for the Honor 10 just so EMUI could be handled better.

Cameras and Camera Samples

Moving on to the camera, you get dual cameras with the Honor 10. One of which is a 16MP sensor whereas the other is a 24 MP monochrome sensor. Both have a f/1.8 aperture.

Photos taken with the RGB sensor are excellent in terms of overall quality and details. There’s no over-saturation, the colors are natural and the white balance is also accurate.

The AI mode on the Honor 10 is also improved over the likes of the P20 Pro and Mate 10 Pro. Both above-mentioned phones took it too far with the AI image enhancements. Colors were overly saturated and mode detection was buggy.

However, the Honor 10 seems to have fixed the issue and doesn’t overdo most of the settings and while the photos do look different from their non-AI counterpart. they aren’t artificial anymore and still come out naturally.

Conclusion

 

Overall, the Honor 10 is an excellent flagship, considering its price. It is available for Rs. 56,000 but it has a processor from a phone that costs almost twice as much, an excellent camera, good display, eye-catching and unique design.

Some “mid rangers” are priced at around Rs. 50,000 so when you put the Honor 10 in between them, it definitely stands out as the best value for your money.

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Published by
Bilal Hakim