Honor has not only equipped the View 10 with a sleek design that embraces 2017’s hottest bezel-less trend but also filled it to the brim with artificial intelligence tricks that are surprisingly useful.
The Honor View 10’s ambitions are pretty clear – it aims to steal the ‘flagship killer’ crown from right under OnePlus’s nose. To achieve that lofty goal, Honor has not only equipped the View 10 with a sleek design that embraces 2017’s hottest bezel-less trend but also filled it to the brim with artificial intelligence tricks that are surprisingly useful.
Honor’s path to dominance in the value flagship segment is not going to be easy. It has the likes of the OnePlus 5T and Nokia 8 in its path which with their sheer value for money and Scandinavian charm respectively make for formidable opponents.
The Honor View 10 a.k.a V10 is being marketed by Honor as “Your first AI phone” and rightly so. Almost every aspect of the smartphone, from the software to the camera is infused with artificial intelligence. While the results are scattershot at best, there is no denying that the V10 has its eyes firmly set on the future.
Let us find out if Honor’s most ambitious phone to date has what it takes to dice it out amongst the likes of the OnePlus 5T:
Let’s just cut to the chase – the Honor V10 is a beautifully designed phone. Honor has always had a penchant of designing phones that look understated, sleek and classy. Be it the stellar Honor 8 and 8 Pro or even the underwhelming Honor 9i, Honor smartphones have always stood out in terms of design.
The V10 is also cut out from the same mould – it looks quite sophisticated and charming. It does not really move the goalpost any further when it comes to smartphone design but every smartphone does not need to. It is a very well made smartphone that does not resort to tacky and gaudy finishes in a bid to stand out from the crowd.
The matte metal back with its cleverly integrated antenna lines (along the top and bottom edges) looks quite elegant. The curved edges and rounded corners help mask the bulk of the smartphone to an extent but one-handed usability is still a pipe dream. Inspite of having a hefty 3,750mAh battery on board, the V10 is surprisingly thin (6.76mm) and light.
The build quality is also top-notch – the buttons feels nice and meaty and the View 10 feels like it can take a drop or two in its stride. While the back has a matte finish, the glossy front fascia attracts a lot of fingerprints which is sure to drive certain people crazy.
Honor has not only equipped the View 10 with a sleek design that embraces 2017’s hottest bezel-less trend but also filled it to the brim with artificial intelligence tricks that are surprisingly useful
The front fascia of the View 10 is fairly unique. In order to accommodate the edge-to-edge display, most bezel-less smartphones have had to shift the fingerprint sensor to the back or get rid of it entirely (cough, iPhone X, cough). The Honor View 10’s fingerprint sensor however is located underneath the display. Not only is the fingerprint sensor, which is cleverly embedded underneath the glass surface, quite fast and accurate but its position makes it much easier to use than its rear mounted equivalents.
The only chink in the Honor V10’s otherwise well-thought out design is the dual camera setup at the back which juts out considerably from the chassis and looks awkward and googly-eyed. Depending on who you ask, the dual camera arrangement looks like an alien staring down your soul or like a minion melting your heart.
2017 will be forever remembered as the year when smartphone bezels packed up their bags and left. Ever since the Galaxy S8 showed up, smartphone design has undergone a fundamental shift and every smartphone manufacturer is rushing to revamp their entire portfolio to reflect the same.
Honor has been one of the more proactive OEM’s in this regard – the company has already thrown its hat into the bezel-less ring with the Honor 9i and Honor 7X and now aims to give the OnePlus 5T a run for its money with the V10.
The V10’s 5.99-inch LCD panel has an aspect ratio of 18:9 and a resolution of 2160×1080 (FullHD+). Simply put, the Honor V10’s display is excellent and one of the highlights of the smartphone. Viewing angles are excellent (one of the best in the price range), colours are bright and punchy, the colour temperature is spot on and brightness levels are adequate. A QuadHD display would have been icing on the cake but the lack of pixels are not really felt in daily use.
The only puzzling omission is the lack of Corning Gorilla Glass protection. Even though our unit held up to day to day use quite well and the display did not scratch as easily as feared, the lack of proper glass protection in a smartphone that costs north of 30,000 rupees is quite disappointing.
The biggest USP of the Honor V10 and the aspect that sets it apart from the host of upper mid-range smartphones out there is the future forward processor nestled deep within its chassis.
Huawei has been experimenting a lot with artificial intelligence (AI) as of late. The Kirin 970 is the first processor that is designed from the ground up for AI. The Neural Processing Unit (NPU) inside the 970 enables AI features to occur locally, instead of over the cloud. Huawei claims this enables smartphones lie the V10 to not only process all AI features faster but also without compromising users privacy.
The Kirin 970 chipset was first introduced in Huawei’s Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro flagships and has now trickled down the price range. The Kirin 970 chipset is not only blazingly fast but comes with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that pumps artificial intelligence infused power through the Honor V10’s veins.
The Honor V10’s rear camera setup is set to be the segment benchmark for the foreseeable future
Almost every aspect of the Honor V10 – from the camera to the software has been given a dose of artificial intelligence love. EMUI 8.0, which runs on Android 8.0 Oreo uses machines learning to understand and anticipate user behaviour. It allocates resources to those apps you use the most to make sure the V10 runs ‘smoothly even after months of use’.
All this is not just marketing fluff. EMUI 8 is a huge step up from previous iterations – it is fast, fluid and butter smooth. Animations are snappy and navigation is quick and frustration-free. Honor has done quite a commendable job of streamlining and speeding up EMUI. Saying that, there is still quite a long way to go.
EMUI still cannot hold a candle to stock Android and even certain skinned versions of Android like Oxygen OS in terms of simplicity and ease of use. It is still quite cluttered and bloat-laden. There are a ton of apps like UC News and even Gameloft game demos (2007 anyone?) pre-installed which just takes away from the premium experience.
Recently the Kirin 970 chipset made the news by (supposedly) posting higher benchmark scores than Qualcomms upcoming flagship Snapdragon 845 processor. Thankfully, all that power translates well into real life. The Honor V10 is blazingly fast – I am talking about flagship level performance here.
The V10 handles everything from simple day today use to intensive workloads with aplomb. During the two weeks I used the smartphone as my daily driver, I experienced next to no lags and hiccups. Thanks to the 6GB of RAM on board, RAM management on the V10 is efficient and even when a lot of apps are running in the background, a minimized app is not killed.
Gaming on the phone is also quite a pleasurable experience. Not only is the 18:9 display perfect for long gaming sessions, but performance is also butter smooth. Games do not utilize the entire grunt of the Kirin 970 chipset by default. It is only when you turn on the gaming mode inside Honor’s Game Suite that graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8 unlock the Kirin 970’s potential. Once they do though, they run at highest settings and with all animations and transitions running smooth and flawlessly.
The Honor V10 has many nifty tricks up its sleeve – some of which are helped along by artificial intelligence. You can answer and place calls with your voice and find your phone by simply saying “where are you”? This is quite gimmicky to be honest and does not work properly in day to day use.
Honor has also followed in the footsteps of the iPhone X and OnePlus 5T and equipped the V10 with facial recognition skills. Oddly enough, the facial recognition cannot be used to unlock the smartphone as of now (the feature is supposedly coming soon via a software update). What you can do currently is prevent nosy friends and family members from reading lock screen notifications by enabling facial recognition lock.
