Honor View 10: Budget price matched with flagship features

The Honor View 10 has an artificial intelligence built into Huawei's Kirin processor that is supposed to use object recognition to optimise photos and videos. — dpa

The price is like a declaration of war. At a little over US$600 (RM2,356), the Honor View 10 gets the same hardware as the Mate 10 Pro, the top smartphone model of Honor's parent company Huawei, yet costs US$200 to US$300 (RM785 to RM1,178) less.

Honor aims to be a bit more colourful and funky than its parent company. The Huawei sub-brand wants to market its phones as lifestyle objects and the View 10 is an attempt to combine this concept with top-level hardware.

On the inside, the components are similar to those in the Mate 10 Pro – Huawei's Kirin 970 processor, 128 GB memory, 6 GB RAM, a dual-lens camera and the Android 8 operating system.

Following the trend for bigger displays, the phone has a 5.99-inch display in 18:9 format with a resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels. The aluminium housing comes in either bright blue or black.

In terms of visual design, there's nothing revolutionary about the View 10. The pleasantly rounded edges mean it fits well in the hand but the position of the fingerprint sensor on the front of the phone makes one-handed use difficult.

In everyday use the phone works reliably. Apps, surfing, messaging and streaming all run smoothly and the user interface is generally fast and fluid.

One annoyance: the phone comes with several pre-installed games and commercial apps, some of which can't be uninstalled. Also, the phone doesn't guarantee any water or dust protection.

It's when you get to the camera that you discover why the phone is so much cheaper than the Mate 10 Pro. The View 10's two cameras with 20 and 16 megapixel resolution take good pictures and videos, but unfortunately there's no optical image stabiliser.

There's also an artificial intelligence built into Huawei's Kirin processor that is supposed to use object recognition to optimise photos and videos, but it doesn't appear very noticeable in everyday use.

It also aims to improve the user experience by analysing frequently used apps and features. Further applications for this AI are likely once the platform is opened up to developers.

Overall, the Honor View 10, while not quite challenging the smartphone class leaders such as the Galaxy S9, the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the Google Pixel 2, the LG V30 or the iPhone X, offers a neat package with good performance and decent battery life at a relatively low price. — dpa