Honor View 10

What is the Honor View 10?

If you’ve been looking for a new phone that won’t break the bank, you may well have stumbled across Chinese brand Honor.  

If you’ve never heard of it before, you’re not alone. Despite a successful first three years in Europe, Honor is still battling to get itself noticed as a mid-range go-to in the UK.

But Huawei’s sister brand is nothing if not persistent. The View 10 is its fourth flagship phone and, just like Huawei did before, sees Honor shifting its sights to a more premium market, and attempt to squeeze as much high-end specs as possible into a sub-£400 phone.

It shares a fair bit with Huawei’s Mate 10 handset, as a result, and gives the similarly priced OnePlus 5T a few things to think about too.  

Honor View 10 – Design

The Honor View 10 is the latest smartphone to ditch the standard 16:9 screen ratio for a skinnier 18:9 one, allowing for a 6-inch display in a compact, easy-to-hold body.

It’s not quite bezel-less, but the edges that frame the screen are very slender indeed, reaching almost to the edge of the device on the left and right.  

The edges to the top and bottom are slightly chunkier, but only thick enough to make way for the View 10’s speakerphone and selfie cam at the top, and a front-facing fingerprint scanner along the bottom.  

The scanner is lightning fast, and personally, I prefer its location here than the OnePlus’ back-mounted option. The scanner can also double up as a touchpad for navigational gestures instead of having them on screen, so you can swipe left and right to browse through photos, or up and down when reading a website, for example.

Like the OnePlus 5T, the View 10 has shunned glass for a back panel made from aluminium (available in Honor’s signature blue, or midnight black), with softly chamfered edges that meet the ever-so slightly curved 2.5D screen around the front. Its aluminium body means wireless charging is unfortunately a no-go, but subtle colour-coded antenna strips along the top and bottom ensure signal isn’t hampered by its metal casing.

Despite looking like it, the View 10 isn’t actually a unibody design (its edges are separate to its back panel, which helps keep manufacturing costs down), but the battery is still fixed and can’t be removed.

Thankfully it manages to squeeze a relatively large 3750 mAh battery into its slim 7mm shell, though it is outdone by its OnePlus 5T competition and Mate 10 stablemate, which both sport 4000 mAh cells.  

Honor View 10 – Screen

The screen on the View 10 is a 2160 x 1080p affair, which equates to a Full HD resolution and some change, with a few extra pixels to fill the 18:9 display.  

For a mid-range phone, the screen is surprisingly bright, and I rarely needed to push it above the halfway point in most situations. You certainly won’t find yourself struggling to see the screen in bright sunlight with the brightness turned up to the max.

The display has the option to tweak the display colour temperature between normal and vivid – I would usually stay far away from vivid options but here it does seem to put a bit of punch into colours that is missing without it. The downside is, it adds a fair amount of blue tones into whites in the process.

You’ll have to play around and decide what works best for your tastes – unfortunately I wasn’t completely sold on the colour balance either way. It’s overall a little cool and wishy washy for me, and could do with a touch more warmth to make it look more natural. Its contrast lacks a little in comparison to the OnePlus 5T’s AMOLED screen too because the View 10 uses an LCD display.

For the most part, video is sharp and well presented, although lacking a little in fine detail, if I’m being picky. I did notice videos on Netflix were prone to a little noise too, particularly with busier scenes (the audience at a comedy gig, for example). The videos I watched on YouTube, however, were clean of such artefacts.

Sound is handled by a single mono speaker which does a fine job for quick videos but isn’t particularly engaging nor goes loud – it won’t do a film soundtrack justice that’s for sure.  

For that, you’ll want to use the increasingly rare 3.5mm headphone jack, which is found along the bottom edge, next to the speaker.

Honor View 10 – Performance

At the heart of the Honor View 10 is the Kirin 970 octa-core processor and 6GB RAM, with an embedded neural processing unit for delivering the phone’s built-in AI smarts. That’s not the usual get up for a phone at this level.

It means the View 10 chomps through whatever you throw at it, with no delay or stutter during high frame-rate gaming or heavy multi-tasking.

Apps open and close without second thought, and browsing through Huawei’s EMUI 8.0 OS (which sits over Android 8 Oreo) is smooth as you could want it.

Honor View 10 – Software

Huawei’s interface tends to divide opinion, and despite being a little heavy handed in its styling, it’s actually pretty customisable if you’re not scared to dive into the menus. For example, out of the box, the View 10 won’t have an app drawer, but you can add it back in from the settings should you wish.  

Honor had plenty to say about the View 10’s AI capabilities at launch, although some are more impressive than others. The ability for the camera to recognise what you’re taking a picture of and adjust its settings accordingly, for example, seems little more than an intelligent auto mode.

The built-in translator app, however, is much more impressive. Developed by Microsoft, not only can it translate text from a photo, it can also translate speech in real-time to and from more than 60 languages (including Klingon for the Trekkies among you). It can even help translate a conversation between several people on separate devices.  

I was unable to verify how accurate its translations are, but the idea is certainly an interesting one to build on either way.

AI is also in charge of the phone’s face unlocking capabilities, something teased at the launch and added in a recent software update at the end of January.

It’s surprisingly accurate, and pretty quick too – only really struggling if in a dark room. It’s not as accomplished as the iPhone X’s effort (the View 10 can’t use face recognition for purchases, for example), but for a mid-range phone to include a pretty premium feature like that, it’s not bad at all.

As far as storage, there’s a nice 128GB of it on board, plus a microSD card slot should you possibly need any more. If not, this doubles up as a dual SIM card slot too, once again going above and beyond what we’d expect at this price.

Honor View 10 – Cameras

Following in the footsteps of the Huawei Mate 10 once again, the View 10 uses a dual-lens rear set up, consisting of a 20MP monochrome lens and a 16MP RGB lens, both with native f/1.8 apertures. The only difference is that they don’t boast the Mate 10’s Leica smarts or any optical image stabilisation, to help keep prices down.

The two cameras work together in every shot – the colour lens capturing the main colour part of the photo, with the higher-megapixel monochrome lens on hand to help add in detail from zoomed shots. You can also take an artsy black-and-white picture with just this lens by selecting the monochrome mode from the menu.

There’s more besides that too, including a pretty extensive pro (manual) mode, an HDR mode (it isn’t automatic, unfortunately), an AR lens for adding fun filters over your photos, a la Snapchat, and a time-lapse mode, among others.

There are also a number of options on the main camera screen itself, including the option to capture a small video snippet with every photo (sort of like Apple’s Live Photos), an aperture adjuster (from f/0.9 to f/16) and a portrait mode for introducing a bokeh effect onto your pictures – the latter being available on both the front and rear-facing cameras.

The colours are nice and bright

Dynamic range is good, even in bright conditions

There’s plenty of detail in the shots

Stick with the auto mode, and the View 10 uses its AI smarts to clock what you’re shooting and ensure it tweaks its settings to suit. This works fast and accurately, recognising when you’re shooting things like pets, flowers, landscapes or people, though it’s unclear exactly what it’s changing (or how it’s improving things).

Still, picture quality is largely good for this level, if not without its hiccups. While it’s quick in use, with autofocus proving to be reliable and next to no shutter lag, it’s not the most consistent in its results.  

One snap will balance lighting well, producing a sharp, focused and well-exposed shot, but then on the next, the brightness will be far too high, leaving overpowering highlights, and losing detail in the process.  

It’s a shame, as when the View 10 gets things right, you can get nice looking photos – however, zoom in and you will notice that fine detail levels are only so-so, and the edges to objects aren’t always as sharp as I’d like.  

Noise is quick to creep in when light drops past its best too, as the View 10 tries to squeeze more light into the shot. The lack of OIS also makes these shots hard to get right first time too – you’ll often get a few shaky results before getting one that’s Instagrammable.

If you’ve got the know-how, the manual camera is likely to be more consistent in its capabilities, but with a bit of patience, you can get some good pictures out of the View 10. However, we’d say the OnePlus 5T has overall better results across the board, particularly when it comes to fine detail and low light.

Honor View 10 – Battery life

As for battery life, the 3750mAh battery does a commendable job at getting the View 10 through a full day with some battery to spare – lighter users might even find it even lasts into the second day without too much fuss.

Be aware that gaming will sap the energy out of it much quicker than anything else though, so you’ll want to go steady on too many games of Asphalt 8 on the way to work if you want the charge to last until the afternoon.

Thankfully, Honor’s SuperCharge tech via its USB-C port is at hand if you do get caught short, providing up to 50% of battery charge in 30 minutes.

Why buy the Honor View 10?

While £400 isn’t exactly pocket change for spending on a phone, with flagship handsets creeping ever closer to the £1000 mark, the Honor View 10 represents a considerable saving for those who can’t afford the very best – or those who just aren’t that bothered about having it.

It gets a whole lot right at this price too. Its lightning-fast performance, innovative features, decent battery life and premium design certainly tick plenty of the must-haves, with its slightly inconsistent camera being one of its only let downs.  

It’s here that the OnePlus 5T starts to overtake the View 10, with its AMOLED screen also pipping Honor’s effort for out-and-out quality. Some might decide that justifies the £50 premium that currently separates them.

However, if it’s storage you need, the 128GB on the View 10 is double that of the cheapest OnePlus 5T, plus has the flexibility of a microSD card slot as well.  

Verdict

The View 10 is proof that Honor’s persistence in the mid-range market is paying off – this is one of its best handsets yet.

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