Honor View 10 initial hands-on: Surpassing OnePlus, creeping into Apple's space
Honor has been producing some good phones across all categories with plenty of bang-for-your-buck and now the company is betting on handsets that harness artificial intelligence to drive advanced features.
The View 10 touted as ‘Your first AI phone’ is the company’s latest flagship smartphone with a dedicated NPU chip tuned to power artificial intelligence which will set a new trend for 2018. The smartphone goes up against the likes of the OnePlus 5T and Xiaomi's Mi Mix 2 in the performance arena and seems to creep up into Apple's iPhone X space as far as a few features are concerned.
The View 10 at first glance essentially looks like a blend of its stablemates. The handset sports a seamless metal design that looks and feels solid as well as extremely premium. The blue variant which we have under our scrutiny, of course, is our personal favourite colour and quite a head-turner. The phone is also available in the black.
The Honor View 10 flaunts a 5.99-inch LCD FHD+ screen with a 1080 x 2160 resolution and an 18:9 aspect ratio, shrinking the surrounding bezels as usual. What's surprising here is the fingerprint sensor has made its way from the rear onto the front and can be found nestled underneath the display, which the company states that it's a better placement as compared to the rear panel because of ergonomics. The smartphone has a speaker grille and USB-type C port at the bottom, and yes, there exists a 3.5mm headphone jack too.
The smartphone is elegant and comfortable to hold in hand - thanks to the slightly rounded corners. The only qualm we have with the device is that the camera protrudes out, which could result in scratched glasses.
The Honor View 10 is the company’s first Android Oreo phone and is powered by Huawei’s own Kirin 970 chipset. The NPU-based AI is seen functional as a few features in apps such as the camera, lock screen and some more. It also has iPhone-like 3D Facial Animation dubbed as Animojis, which should appeal to those looking for iPhone X-like features. The device comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB storage.
During a brief time with the phone, it appears to be quite responsive throughout its user interface and the App loading times are swift. Although, a detailed analysis of the battery performance and how the phone tackles intensive workloads will have to wait till the full review.
As for the camera, the View 10 comes with a 16MP+20MP dual camera setup that misses out on the Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) but holds a monochrome sensor for enhanced details. We managed to click a few shots and must say that we are impressed.
The Honor View 10 is a feature rich phone that offers more than the competition on paper. The device certainly looks promising but timely development add frequent updates are the only parts where users fear most. stay tuned — our in-depth review will be up shortly.
