Launched on a promise of ‘beauty in AI’ this flagship model justifies the hype
On a sun-kissed mid-May afternoon, Honor released its latest flagship device, the Honor 10, boasting an artificial intelligence platform and fluid colour choices. On the face of it, the Huawei sub-brand had delivered on its promise to bring beauty in AI. When holding the device you are greeted with a very nice 5.84 inch LCD screen which can handle most, if not all, graphical challenges very well. The industry trending ‘notch’ is up top, providing the speaker and 24MP front camera that provides facial recognition, although it does seem to be as small as possible. Below the screen is the fingerprint reader which, for the first time for Honor, is under glass. This seems like a strange decision for Honor when bearing in mind they were one of the first to put the reader on the back. But the main focus of the device is the dual 24MP monochrome and 16MP colour camera at the rear. Using artificial intelligence the Honor 10 can detect up to four layers of an image in 500 scenarios and 22 built-in categories of photo. Under the screen, there is a 3,400 mAh battery powering a Octa-core Kirin 970 chipset. Users get 64GB or 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM with the Honor 10 running Android 8.1.
Honor has launched the Honor 10, its flagship smartphone for 2018. It brings to life the concept of ‘beauty in AI’ and reveals two major groundbreaking and industry-leading smartphone technologies to consumers. The first is the advanced AI 2.0 technology, applied chiefly to the dual camera. Second is the Honor 10 CMF 1 design, a 3D glass back with a stunning nano-scale optical coating with 15 layers of shimmering colour. With innovative devices which deliver a premium experience at competitive prices, Honor continues to lead the industry in its home market as the number one smartphone e-brand in China and has achieved 100 per cent growth in overseas markets since its inception. “We believe the recipe of success is simple – give consumers a really good product. That’s what we work hard for every day at Honor,” said George Zhao, president of Honor. “But we don’t just stop at making a good product. We want to co-create a new lifestyle with young people worldwide. We listen to them, we bounce ideas around with them. They are our inspiration.”
The release date of just before the OnePlus 6 and around a week after the LG G7 gave the device immediate competition in terms of spotlight before getting round to taking on Apple, Samsung, Google and its parent company, Huawei. One of the biggest USPs for Honor is the value aspect and in this instance, it has to be considered a winner in the flagship space – only OnePlus comes close, frankly. The £400 price tag does, however, come at a cost (no pun intended) as holding the phone we found that features and functions that should be easily carried out took just that little bit too long, which was disappointing. Playing games there was a short lag but nothing that made the game unplayable, but the biggest frustration is the facial recognition which is so slow to the point where it’s quicker to ditch it and type a password in. However, the fingerprint reader is very quick, albeit with a slight lag for the screen to wake up. The camera is, at best, average for a flagship. The AI layer detection offered few advantages, and the interface could be a lot more user-friendly. It took me a while to get it going and I’m still not sure how to do it, which doesn’t bode well for its youthful target market.
