HONOR VIEW 10 tested
Honor’s latest flagship handset goes toe-to-toe with the OnePlus 5T, but can it deliver a knockout blow? £449 store.hihonor.com
Mid-range phones are all the rage right now, and here’s our verdict on one of the best you can buy
Since November last year, the OnePlus 5T has ruled over the mid-range phone market largely unchallenged. Its great screen, affordable price point, and premium design and features made it an absolute no-brainer if you weren’t shopping with a flagship-level budget, and while other devices like the Honor 9 had it beaten on price, or on specific functions (like the ZenFone 4’s excellent image-taking capabilities), they didn’t offer the same level of holistic package.
New challenger
Fast-forward to now and, finally, a worthy rival has emerged: the Honor View 10. As well as largely matching the specs and functionality of the OnePlus 5T, the Honor View 10 also brings some on-trend, flagship-level boons to the fight. But can the Honor View 10 take down the OnePlus 5T and reign supreme in the hotlycontested mid-range handset market?
The first thing that strikes you when you take the Honor View 10 out
of the box is how thin it is. At just 7mm thick, the phone is slimmer than heavyweights like the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy S8, and makes the lightweight device feel very lithe in the hand. The only thing that interrupts the streamlining of its form-factor is the phone’s two protruding rear cameras.
The Honor View 10 is available to buy in Navy Blue (photographed here) and Midnight Black. The phone features an aluminium rather than glass back, which doesn’t quite deliver the wow-factor we were hoping for, but it still looks smart, and the sides of the device are nicely bevelled, giving it a premium feel overall. The screen edges are also slimline, which helps to emphasis the size of the 5.99-inch screen, and keep its overall size down.
Just like the Honor 9, which T3 thought was tremendous value on review, the Honor View 10’s fingerprint sensor is located on the front-bottom of the phone. We’d have preferred to have it at the rear for easier access using one hand, as with the OnePlus 5T - and because the View 10’s menu is completely on-screen, the button could have been removed altogether to make the front of the handset appear even smoother. Oddly, the phone doesn’t come with an official water resistance rating, just like the Huawei Mate 10. We’re guessing that there is some degree of water resistance, but it’s slightly disconcerting nonetheless.
At the bottom of the handset you’ll find a near-identical setup to the OnePlus 5T, including a USB-C charging port, speaker and, unlike many high-end flagship phones today, a headphone jack.
Wide style
The Honor View 10 is equipped with a 5.99-inch IPS LCD screen, which boasts the trendy ultra-wide 18:9 aspect ratio that we’ve seen on almost every new phone recently. The resolution is Full HD, which at 18:9 means 1080x2160, and is very similar to that on the OnePlus 5T, aside from the fact that the latter has an OLED screen. This difference in screen tech means that the Honor View 10’s display looks slightly sharper to the eye than the OnePlus 5T, but doesn’t quite match its colour and contrast.
The screen is powered by a 3,750mAh battery, which is a marked bump up over the OnePlus 5T’s 3,300mAh, however, it is also a little lower than the Huawei Mate 10’s, which is rated at 4,000 mAh. From our informal testing here at T3, the View 10’s battery is more than capable of pushing the phone through a day with moderate usage. The USB-C port delivers speedy charging when the battery runs dry – Honor says you can get to 50 per cent in 30 mins.
The View 10 runs Android 8.0 Oreo with Honor’s own EMUI 8.0 skin on top. This is a moderate skin over stock Android, and the exact same user interface found on the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. We haven’t exactly being enamoured with past incarnations of EMUI, but this new version is a definite improvement. However, for those who are not familiar with it out of the box there is definitely a degree of relearning to
undertake, something that will no doubt frustrate those of you who love the stock Android experience, and want it again.
For example, EMUI removes the app drawer completely. Considering this is a key navigation tool in most other Android UI variants, including the stock models, it feels very strange at first. There are snappy vertical app menus instead, which are easily accessed as you get used to the phone. In addition, there are some useful customisation options, such as the ability to widely dictate how many icon columns the phone’s home screens have. Thankfully, swiping through these menus is very fast.
Thanks to the Honor View 10’s 128GB of internal storage, there is plenty of room for all your apps and games, and with the impressive Kirin 970 processor powering them, they run incredibly well.
From our testing period, we suffered no slowdown when playing games like Super Mario Run and
Asphalt Nitro, and we can’t imagine many mobile games released in the near future that would cause any. The 970’s 12-core Mali-G72 graphics chipset clearly has plenty of power to spare, which isn’t really surprising considering its high-end origins.
Smart personality
In terms of bundled apps, the most notable on the View 10 is Microsoft’s excellent Translator app, which not only has been designed to work with Honor’s built-in Neural-network Processing Unit (NPU), but also boasts some seriously impressive capabilities. Simply point the phone’s camera at any foreign language text and the app automatically translates it for you on screen or, if you are trying to communicate with someone
verbally, you can input via speech or text also. It is a smart utilisation of the View 10’s NPU AI capabilities.
And speaking of the View 10’s in-built NPU AI, it is a core part of the phone’s dual-camera system, which consists of a rear colour 16MP sensor and 20MP monochrome sensor, as well as a front-facing 13MP camera. This means real-time scene and object recognition – 13 different types to be precise – as well as neat additions such as an AI-powered Portrait mode that specialises in delivering sharp edges and lush background blurring.
Unlike the more expensive Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the View 10 doesn’t feature active image stabilisation. However it does feature a plethora of modes and shooting options. More standard modes like Panorama and Night shot are joined by more creative ones like Artist, Filter and Light painting, which allow you a great degree of freedom in how you take and present pictures.
And, without over-complicating it, taking pictures with the Honor View 10 is just a fun and mostly error-free experience. Shutter lag is almost non-existent in most circumstances, there’s good fast focusing, and the various shooting modes mean interesting point-and-click snaps - which we feel is what the vast majority of users want from their handset. The fact that all the while the NPU is tweaking your shots to attain optimal image quality also adds to the phone’s ease of use. As a result, images are easily on a par with the Mate 10 (which shares a similar camera setup) and close to the Google Pixel 2’s superb snapper.
View to kill
The View 10 is a seriously good phone, then. It sits somewhere between the excellent OnePlus 5T and the equally good - but significantly more expensive - Huawei Mate 10 Pro. Sure, it lacks a little bit of the wow-factor premium delivered by the Mate 10 Pro and its Leica cameras, and it does lose out to the 5T in a few areas, such as its use of an LCD screen instead of a superior OLED one. However, the overall package that the View 10 brings to the table - at a very attractive price point - makes it an excellent new entry to the mid-range smartphone market. And it’s a new entry that easily sits on the same level as the OnePlus 5T.
Indeed, when you consider that the View 10 delivers a 18:9 Full HD screen, a dual-lens camera system, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage space (and with room for more via microSD), dual-SIM capability, and the excellent octa-core Kirin 970 processor with its in-built Neural-network Processing Unit (NPU), it does make you question whether you really need to spend more than £500 on a new phone these days, especially when this comes loaded with excellent, flagship-level apps, too.
Aided by some AI trickery, the dual cameras produce crisp pictures