Huawei's Honor 10 smartphone has the notch seen in many modern smartphones to house speakers, the front camera and sensors. — dpa
Honor, a sub-brand of Chinese smartphone maker Huawei, aims to offer high-spec phones that rival Huawei's top-of-the-range models, but at mid-range prices.
The Honor 10 is the latest in the line, offering largely the same technology as the Huawei P20, but a couple of hundred dollars cheaper.
The case is made of metal, while the front and back are glass. The 5.8-inch IPS display is high-resolution (2,280 x 1,080 pixels) and has the now familiar notch seen in many modern smartphones to house speakers, the front camera and sensors.
Despite the mid-range price, the phone feels high quality. The fingerprint sensor is one of the fastest on the market, though its position below the screen requires some hand contortions.
The Honor 10 comes with the Android 8 operating system and Huawei's own user interface EMUI, which looks similar to Apple's iOS but isn't as easy to use. Annoyingly, a lot of bloatware is preinstalled and is difficult to remove.
There's no slot for a memory card, so users will have to make do with the 64 or 128 gigabytes that come with the phone.
Inside the phone is Huawei's current top processor, the Kirin 970, which supports artificial intelligence (AI).
The camera consists of two lenses, a 16-megapixel sensor and a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor. Together, the cameras determine depth information, for example to achieve background blurring in portrait photos.
AI is at the heart of the camera and, according to Huawei, results in more beautiful photos as the camera recognises objects, including people, food, animals and landscapes, and adjusts the exposure, colours and contrast accordingly.
Most of the time, the image enhancements work quite well, especially in difficult lighting situations where there are cloudy skies or lots of sun. However, sometimes the colours are unnaturally bright or the contrast is too strong.
Features found in more expensive cameras and missing here include optical image stabilisation and a good night-time shooting mode.
In conclusion, the Honor 10 looks good, performs well and has little to fear from top-of-the-range models, besides a few minor quibbles. And all for several hundred dollars less than the class leaders.
The Honor 10 with 64 gigabytes of storage costs US$460 (RM1,889); the 128 GB version, US$520 (RM2,136). – dpa
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