Alongside the launch of Honor 7X, Huawei’s sub-brand Honor also unveiled its latest flagship device, the Honor View 10 at the London event on Tuesday. The company is all set to launch View10 globally including in India on January 8, 2018. Honor has priced the smartphone at 499 euros (roughly Rs. 38,000). The exact India price will be announced later.
According to Huawei, they are bringing its bezel-less V10 smartphone with an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled chipset — the first from Honor. The company is touting the phone as “Your first AI phone” and it features company’s AI smarts that were earlier seen on Huawei’s flagship Mate 10.
Apart from AI chip in its octa-core Kirin 970 chipset, the phone has a dual camera at rear and a Point Cloud Depth Front Camera. Which such hardware, the phone offers features like iPhone X style Animoji and facial recognition technology. Let’s find out more about View 10’s interesting features.
Things we Like
The phone has some flagship like features, that we like the most about the phone. The full view display, octa-core AI enabled chipset and dual camera are the things we like in View 10.
Design and Display
Like many of 2017 flagship phones, the Honor View 10 also removed thick bezels from its design formula. It has a slightly curved glass finish at the front that merges nicely into the phone’s aluminum body and continues the trend of 18:9 displays with minimal bezels.
It features a 5.99-inch full HD+ IPS LCD display with a resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixel and an aspect ratio of 18:9. Overall, the device looks premium with rest of its design consists of some familiar elements.
Processor with AI Chip
It is powered by all new Kirin 970 octa-core ARM Cortex CPU with a Mali-G72 12-core GPU. It comes with 4GB / 6GB RAM options. The powerful Kirin 970 chipset includes a Neural-Network Processing Unit (NPU) at the heart. Thus, it powers a series of AI applications like recognizing different scenes when taking photos, translating different languages in real-time even without an Internet connection and optimising the phone’s performance.
3D Facial Animation feature and Face Unlock
The phone has a 13 MP front camera which is accompanied by the 3D face recognition hardware and software which Honor calls as the Point Cloud Depth Camera. It can create 3D scans of small objects and the company claims that the View 10 features a 3D Facial Animation feature which works exactly like Animoji on the iPhone X. The image mimics the facial movements of the user to create a short GIF which can also be sent as a message.
The V10 will also offer the face unlock feature which is similar to what the FaceID is in the iPhone X. The camera is capable of 300K pin cloud reconstruction in 10 seconds for facial unlocking.
The dual camera
Coming to the camera department, the Honor V10 features a dual camera setup at the back consisting of a 16MP RGB sensor and a 20MP monochrome sensor. The Honor View 10 dual-lens camera is equipped with f/1.8 wide aperture and 2-in-1 PDAF automatic focusing. There is also a portrait mode for an auto depth of field effect on both rear and front cameras.
Battery with Fast charging support
The phone packs a 3,750mAh battery with Honor SuperCharge technology. It makes Honor View 10 ideal for gamers and heavy users. Honor claims the SuperCharge can charge the battery to 50 percent in just 30 minutes while operating at a low temperature and voltage.
Things we don’t like
Apart from all premium level features and solid internals, there are still a few things that, if they were there, could make the device better.
No Protection
The flagship level phone comes with a bigger and FHD+ full-screen display. With the latest 18:9 aspect ratio trend, it minimizes the bezels and looks great, but, it doesn’t come with Gorilla Glass protection. Moreover, the phone is not certified for water and dust resistance. So, despite having solid hardware and features, the protection features still lack in View 10.
No Stock Android
When the phone starts shipping, it will feature the latest software Android Oreo, but with Huawei-flavoured EMUI 8.0 on top. If we talk about software experience, the EMUI could not be as smooth and favorable for many as stock Android experience.
The Honor View 10 will be made available in India, along with France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, the UK, and the United States on January 8. The View 10 price in India will be revealed only then.
