Honor View 10 (Honor V10) hands-on

Honor recently announced the 7X, its new hope for breaking into the U.S. market, but it’s got another device hitting the market that may pique people’s interest too. This is the Honor View 10, also known as Honor V10 in China. The Honor V10 could be thought of as the sibling to the Huawei Mate 10. It’s got a similarly sized low-bezel display, front facing fingerprint reader, the same Kirin 970 SoC, which comes with the cutting edge Mali-G72 GPU. Many of the internals of this device are the same, but it has some trade offs which make it unique, and much more affordable, than the Mate 10. Unlike the Mate 10, this phone’s got a 1080p screen, akin to the Mate 10 Pro. Is this a bad thing? Not at all. 1080p screens are still perfectly fine, and this particular 5.99″ FHD+ display looks big, bright, and beautiful. If you want a big display, this has one, and it maintains a form factor that fits comfortably in the hand. Powering that enormous display is a 3,750 mAh battery, which is quite respectable for a phone this size. Sure, it’s not the 4,000 mAh cell powering the Mate 10, but it’s close. Honor didn’t give us any estimates as to how long this battery should last you. We think it will do quite well, though we’ll have to see how it fares in our full review. The View 10’s Kirin 970 SoC puts it on par with phones running the Snapdragon 835. If anyone said this wasn’t a flagship, they’d be mistaken. This is the best processor Huawei currently makes. The Mali-G72 is equally flagship-grade, with 12 cores to help it bust through graphically intensive tasks. We think you’ll see similar performance to Huawei’s Mate 10 series of phones, but time will tell once we get more hands-on time with this device. The specs are quite impressive, especially for a likely much cheaper device. The Honor View 10 comes with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage standard— quite a lot for any device, especially as a baseline. You can expand that storage to 384 GB with a 128 GB microSD card too, so you should be able to fit (most of) your music collection on here locally. This configuration is usually only seen in the highest-end devices, and we’re really glad to see Honor playing hardball. The phone’s got dual cameras on the rear, with 16 and 20 MP resolutions. These come with a wide aperture range as well, ranging from f/.95 to f/16. That’s pretty crazy wide open, and we’re excited to see just how much depth of field we’re able to pull out of such a small sensor. Smartphone cameras are not usually very good at that, but we’re hoping to see some interesting results. These aren’t Leica cameras like you’d find in the Mate 10 or Mate 10 Pro, so you’re not going to able to brag about that. They do, however, have a lot of the same camera features as the Mate series. There’s a nice “pro” mode, moving picture, portrait mode, and yes, even monochrome. We were able to take a couple sample shots at the event. Take a look and let us know what you think. The camera software I tested is probably not final. The images watermarked themselves “Huawei P9 Leica Dual Camera”, so take them with a grain of salt for now. For you sound guys out there, the View 10 sports Bluetooth 4.2 as well as aptX and aptX HD support. You’re not getting the latest and greatest Bluetooth 5.0, but 4.2 does very well with power and with these codecs you’ll get you some great sound (assuming you’ve got headphones that support it). EMUI 8.0 is the fork of Android powering this phone, and it’s based on Android 8.0 Oreo. This is nice to see, and you won’t have to wait months to get all the newest features Android has to offer. Whether this phone will be updated down the road is another question, but we have a long way to go until we see the next version of Android. The device will come in Navy Blue and Midnight Black once it hits the US, but China will get additional Red and Gold color variants. Specs: Honor V10 Display5.99-inch FHD+ display 2160 x 1080 resolution 403 ppi 18:9 aspect ratio ProcessorHuawei Kirin 970 Octa-core CPU (4 Cortex A73 2.36 GHz + 4 Cortex A53 1.8 GHz) + i7 co-processor + NPU GPUMali-G72 MP12 RAM6 GB LPDDR4 Storage128 GB MicroSD card slot (Up to 128GB) CamerasRear cameras: 20 MP + 12 MP RGB sensors f/.95 aperture, PDAF+CAF+Laser+Depth auto focus, 2x Hybrid Zoom, 4K video recording Front camera: 13 MP sensor, fixed focus Battery3,750 mAh Non-removable SIMDual SIM Primary SIM: 4G Secondary SIM: 2G/3G/4G 3.5 mm headphone jackYes ConnectivityWi-Fi 2.4 G, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with Wi-Fi Direct support Bluetooth 4.2, support BLE support aptX/aptX HD and LDAC HD Audio USB Type-C DisplayPort 1.2 SoftwareAndroid 8.0 Oreo EMUI 8.0 ColorsNavy Blue, Midnight Black Dimensions and weight157 x 74.98 x 6.97 mm 172 g Gallery: Are you excited for the Honor View 10? It look sure to make a splash once it lands, so stay tuned for all the latest on this phone as it hits.