The Honor 10, the latest smartphone from Huawei's sibling brand, uses the same high-end CPU as the $650 Mate 10 Pro and the $1,100 P20 Pro.
At £399 (about $535), it joins the OnePlus 6 in the category of phones that feature top-of-the-line components at a midrange price.
If you live in the United States, however, you'll need to import it; we tested the Honor 10 in the United Kingdom for our sister site, Daxdi UK, and it's unlikely that it will officially cross the pond.
Design
In addition to the usual black and silver options, the Honor 10 is available in polychromatic Phantom Green and Phantom Blue versions.
The phone is coated in multiple layers of reflective metallic paint, just like the Honor 9, giving it a vague lenticular effect.
Its body is shiny enough that it has a habit of catching whatever available light is available and throwing it back at you.
It's prone to fingerprints, however, easily picking up smears, smudges, and other telltale signs of your sweaty palms being all over it.
As usual, you should invest in a case and microfiber cleaning cloth.
The ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which hides the sensor under the phone's glass body, is a design first for Honor.
It certainly looks neat, with the front of the phone being a completely flat surface with no bumps or indentations.
But compared with other phones with standard fingerprint scanners, we struggled to get this one to unlock as easily.
More often than not though, we ran into messages that it was unable to recognize the fingerprint.
Fortunately, the phone also supports face unlocking, which works a lot better, but is less secure.
The Honor 10's LCD measures 5.84 inches, with a resolution of 2,240 by 1,080 pixels.
This works out to 433ppi (pixels per inch), as well as 13.19 SQUID (our own Square Inches of Display metric).
Put another way, it's similar in density and surface area to the iPhone X (458ppi, 12.36 SQUID).
That said, as an IPS LCD, it can't boast the same levels of high contrast as you get from the OLED iPhone X or Samsung Galaxy phones, though its viewing angles are good and it gets bright enough to ensure that you can check texts and Google Maps outside on sunny days.
Storage and Battery
With the 128GB model, 115GB of storage is available.
While previous Honor phones offered the option of inserting a microSD card in place of a second SIM, the Honor 10 is SIM only.
The dual slots are still useful if you want to keep personal and business numbers separate on one phone.
We tested the Honor 10's 3,400mAh battery by streaming video over 4G at maximum brightness and volume.
The phone lasted 5 hours and 36 minutes, pretty standard given the screen and battery size.
Using the supplied 5V/4.5A Huawei SuperCharge adapter, you can go from zero to full in 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Performance
Like virtually every Huawei phone that's been released since last October, the Honor 10 is powered by the company's HiSilicon Kirin 970 CPU, an octo-core processor with four small (1.8GHz) and four large (2.4GHz) cores.
It's combined with a Mali G72 graphics processor.
As you might expect, benchmark tests yield very similar results to what we've seen with other phones using the same CPU.
The Honor 10 showed an AnTuTu score of 203861, putting it roughly on the same level as the Huawei P20 Pro (209,089) in terms of overall performance.
It lags a bit behind the iPhone X (233,592) and the Samsung Galaxy S9+ (267,233), but not by much considering the difference in price.
Geekbench scores returned 1,886 for single core and 6,530 for multi-core, which is comparable with the results we got with the Mate 10 Pro (1,898 and 6,670) and the P20 Pro (1,924 and 6,750).
PCMark showed an overall score of 6949 for the Honor 10, with 6733 for browsing, 12828 for photo editing, and 5327 for video editing.
Again, this is more or less on par for the course with current high-end Android phones.
3D graphics results were a mixed bag.
On the one hand, the Honor 10 mustered 22fps in the GFXBench Car Crash test with the car both on and off the screen, but at times it visibly struggled to convincingly render the speeding cars.
On the other hand, it managed 59fps (on screen) and 110fps (off screen) when playing the more action-packed T-Rex Chase test.
Those are excellent scores, comparable with the Samsung Galaxy S9+ in the same test (60fps and 151fps).
Network
The Honor 10 features Cat 18 LTE radios, but since no network in the UK can really support gigabit LTE speeds right now, we didn't even come close to touching what it's potentially capable of.
Still, the phone performed as well as could be expected, similar to others with the same antenna and chipset we've tested out on UK networks.
On EE, we averaged 62.03Mbps down and 30.52Mbps up indoors, and 64.29Mbps down and 30.43Mbps up outside.
Download and upload speeds on O2 were also more or less on par with other devices; on average we got 18.83Mbps down and 9.19Mbps up when testing indoors, and 17.78Mbps down and 19.22Mbps outside.
Three, which appears to be getting ready for some extensive spectrum refarming, returned the worst results.
Download and upload speeds indoors averaged 2.56Mbps and 12.9Mbps, and 5.32Mbps down and 8.85Mbps up outside.
This isn't a good sign, since it's got dibs on selling the Honor 10 on contract in the UK.
Oddly, we couldn't connect to Vodafone at any time in testing.
User Interface
Huawei's EMUI 8.1 custom skin runs over Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box.
As far as custom UIs go, EMUI isn't particularly bad: The settings menu means that most options are no more than three taps away, you get a fairly good degree of control over the screen's color temperature, and the storage cleaner tool lets you manually scrub and free up any RAM that's being used up by long-dormant processes.
While EMUI is thoughtfully laid out, it could prove to be a barrier to Android P.
We'll see as updates come out.
Cameras
The Honor 10 has a 24/16-megapixel dual-lens main camera, which allows for "hybrid zoom." When zooming in, the camera dials the resolution down to 16 megapixels, using the bigger sensor to get closer to subjects without losing too much detail.
This setup is becoming increasingly common in flagship phones, generally improving picture quality, and for some phones (not the Honor 10), enabling advanced augmented reality features.
In theory, this also promises lossless 2x magnification.
While the Honor 10's photos at 2x are very good, however, they aren't quite as crisp as unzoomed photos.
The f/1.8 aperture improves low-light performance, though noise still occurs in really dark rooms; you'll want to turn the flash on most of the time.
The Honor 10 doesn't feature a dedicated Night Mode like the P20 range has, so you can't take decent long exposures without the aid of a tripod.
Beyond 2x optical zoom, you can push all the way up to 10x with standard digital zoom.
This results in shaky shots and a noticeable drop in detail, especially when you inspect those snaps up close.
Check out the sample images below for an idea of what you can expect.
Honor 10 (10x Zoom)
OnePlus 6 (8x Zoom)
Samsung Galaxy S9+ (10x Zoom)
As you can see, the Honor 10 does a good job of not adding too much in the way of sharpening, especially compared with the OnePlus 6.
As you might expect, neither camera is anywhere near as good as what you can achieve on a pricier phone like the Samsung Galaxy S9+.
Other bells and whistles include algorithm-powered scene recognition.
Aperture mode also returns, letting you create some arty bokeh effects.
Generally, stills taken with the Honor 10 look good, but not without contrast issues, oversharpening, and exaggerated colors, with foliage in particular suffering from this.
Check out the rose below, which is a much gentler color in reality than the Honor 10's shocking pink explosion implies.
See how both the OnePlus 6 and Galaxy S9+ better handle this shot by not only producing a more natural tone, but also by better capturing the darker areas of the flower's center; it's not a gravitational singularity, as the Honor 10 implies.
Honor 10
OnePlus 6
Samsung Galaxy S9+
Video modes include the standard 1080p at 30fps and 60fps, 4k at 30fps, slow-motion (1080p at 120fps), and time-lapse (720p at 15fps).
Fast focusing didn't work well for video in testing.
Even with object tracking toggled, the Honor 10 often struggled to adapt to any sudden changes in the frame, or track fast-moving objects like passing vehicles and cyclists.
The front-facing camera features a 24-megapixel sensor, fixed focus, and a number of AI-assisted portrait lighting modes, to make your selfies look more dramatic.
Because Honor is a Huawei spin-off, the usual beauty mode effects are available, including skin smoothing, lightening, and darkening, as well as things that make your eyes look bigger or shinier.
If you've ever wanted to look like an anime shop window mannequin, you'll love these effects.
Conclusions
The Honor 10 is a solid value, offering a semblance of the flagship experience for significantly less money.
Its network and processing performance are close to pricier models (including Huawei's own P20 Pro) thanks to a Cat 18 antenna and Kirin 970 CPU.
And it looks like a flagship phone, too; that glass-and-metal back positively shimmers in the sunlight.
It lags behind Apple's and Samsung's flagships in camera performance, though, as well as the similarly priced OnePlus.
And all of this is moot for most Americans.
Unless you're willing to import it, it's much less of a hassle to pick up the OnePlus 6 or the Honor View 10 instead.
Pros
High-end CPU for a midrange price.
Fun camera effects including bokeh, 2x lossless zoom, and AI-assisted scene recognition.
The Bottom Line
The Honor 10 offers a facsimile of the Huawei P20 Pro experience for a fraction of the price.
The Honor 10, the latest smartphone from Huawei's sibling brand, uses the same high-end CPU as the $650 Mate 10 Pro and the $1,100 P20 Pro.
At £399 (about $535), it joins the OnePlus 6 in the category of phones that feature top-of-the-line components at a midrange price.
If you live in the United States, however, you'll need to import it; we tested the Honor 10 in the United Kingdom for our sister site, Daxdi UK, and it's unlikely that it will officially cross the pond.
Design
In addition to the usual black and silver options, the Honor 10 is available in polychromatic Phantom Green and Phantom Blue versions.
The phone is coated in multiple layers of reflective metallic paint, just like the Honor 9, giving it a vague lenticular effect.
Its body is shiny enough that it has a habit of catching whatever available light is available and throwing it back at you.
It's prone to fingerprints, however, easily picking up smears, smudges, and other telltale signs of your sweaty palms being all over it.
As usual, you should invest in a case and microfiber cleaning cloth.
The ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which hides the sensor under the phone's glass body, is a design first for Honor.
It certainly looks neat, with the front of the phone being a completely flat surface with no bumps or indentations.
But compared with other phones with standard fingerprint scanners, we struggled to get this one to unlock as easily.
More often than not though, we ran into messages that it was unable to recognize the fingerprint.
Fortunately, the phone also supports face unlocking, which works a lot better, but is less secure.
The Honor 10's LCD measures 5.84 inches, with a resolution of 2,240 by 1,080 pixels.
This works out to 433ppi (pixels per inch), as well as 13.19 SQUID (our own Square Inches of Display metric).
Put another way, it's similar in density and surface area to the iPhone X (458ppi, 12.36 SQUID).
That said, as an IPS LCD, it can't boast the same levels of high contrast as you get from the OLED iPhone X or Samsung Galaxy phones, though its viewing angles are good and it gets bright enough to ensure that you can check texts and Google Maps outside on sunny days.
Storage and Battery
With the 128GB model, 115GB of storage is available.
While previous Honor phones offered the option of inserting a microSD card in place of a second SIM, the Honor 10 is SIM only.
The dual slots are still useful if you want to keep personal and business numbers separate on one phone.
We tested the Honor 10's 3,400mAh battery by streaming video over 4G at maximum brightness and volume.
The phone lasted 5 hours and 36 minutes, pretty standard given the screen and battery size.
Using the supplied 5V/4.5A Huawei SuperCharge adapter, you can go from zero to full in 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Performance
Like virtually every Huawei phone that's been released since last October, the Honor 10 is powered by the company's HiSilicon Kirin 970 CPU, an octo-core processor with four small (1.8GHz) and four large (2.4GHz) cores.
It's combined with a Mali G72 graphics processor.
As you might expect, benchmark tests yield very similar results to what we've seen with other phones using the same CPU.
The Honor 10 showed an AnTuTu score of 203861, putting it roughly on the same level as the Huawei P20 Pro (209,089) in terms of overall performance.
It lags a bit behind the iPhone X (233,592) and the Samsung Galaxy S9+ (267,233), but not by much considering the difference in price.
Geekbench scores returned 1,886 for single core and 6,530 for multi-core, which is comparable with the results we got with the Mate 10 Pro (1,898 and 6,670) and the P20 Pro (1,924 and 6,750).
PCMark showed an overall score of 6949 for the Honor 10, with 6733 for browsing, 12828 for photo editing, and 5327 for video editing.
Again, this is more or less on par for the course with current high-end Android phones.
3D graphics results were a mixed bag.
On the one hand, the Honor 10 mustered 22fps in the GFXBench Car Crash test with the car both on and off the screen, but at times it visibly struggled to convincingly render the speeding cars.
On the other hand, it managed 59fps (on screen) and 110fps (off screen) when playing the more action-packed T-Rex Chase test.
Those are excellent scores, comparable with the Samsung Galaxy S9+ in the same test (60fps and 151fps).
Network
The Honor 10 features Cat 18 LTE radios, but since no network in the UK can really support gigabit LTE speeds right now, we didn't even come close to touching what it's potentially capable of.
Still, the phone performed as well as could be expected, similar to others with the same antenna and chipset we've tested out on UK networks.
On EE, we averaged 62.03Mbps down and 30.52Mbps up indoors, and 64.29Mbps down and 30.43Mbps up outside.
Download and upload speeds on O2 were also more or less on par with other devices; on average we got 18.83Mbps down and 9.19Mbps up when testing indoors, and 17.78Mbps down and 19.22Mbps outside.
Three, which appears to be getting ready for some extensive spectrum refarming, returned the worst results.
Download and upload speeds indoors averaged 2.56Mbps and 12.9Mbps, and 5.32Mbps down and 8.85Mbps up outside.
This isn't a good sign, since it's got dibs on selling the Honor 10 on contract in the UK.
Oddly, we couldn't connect to Vodafone at any time in testing.
User Interface
Huawei's EMUI 8.1 custom skin runs over Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box.
As far as custom UIs go, EMUI isn't particularly bad: The settings menu means that most options are no more than three taps away, you get a fairly good degree of control over the screen's color temperature, and the storage cleaner tool lets you manually scrub and free up any RAM that's being used up by long-dormant processes.
While EMUI is thoughtfully laid out, it could prove to be a barrier to Android P.
We'll see as updates come out.
Cameras
The Honor 10 has a 24/16-megapixel dual-lens main camera, which allows for "hybrid zoom." When zooming in, the camera dials the resolution down to 16 megapixels, using the bigger sensor to get closer to subjects without losing too much detail.
This setup is becoming increasingly common in flagship phones, generally improving picture quality, and for some phones (not the Honor 10), enabling advanced augmented reality features.
In theory, this also promises lossless 2x magnification.
While the Honor 10's photos at 2x are very good, however, they aren't quite as crisp as unzoomed photos.
The f/1.8 aperture improves low-light performance, though noise still occurs in really dark rooms; you'll want to turn the flash on most of the time.
The Honor 10 doesn't feature a dedicated Night Mode like the P20 range has, so you can't take decent long exposures without the aid of a tripod.
Beyond 2x optical zoom, you can push all the way up to 10x with standard digital zoom.
This results in shaky shots and a noticeable drop in detail, especially when you inspect those snaps up close.
Check out the sample images below for an idea of what you can expect.
Honor 10 (10x Zoom)
OnePlus 6 (8x Zoom)
Samsung Galaxy S9+ (10x Zoom)
As you can see, the Honor 10 does a good job of not adding too much in the way of sharpening, especially compared with the OnePlus 6.
As you might expect, neither camera is anywhere near as good as what you can achieve on a pricier phone like the Samsung Galaxy S9+.
Other bells and whistles include algorithm-powered scene recognition.
Aperture mode also returns, letting you create some arty bokeh effects.
Generally, stills taken with the Honor 10 look good, but not without contrast issues, oversharpening, and exaggerated colors, with foliage in particular suffering from this.
Check out the rose below, which is a much gentler color in reality than the Honor 10's shocking pink explosion implies.
See how both the OnePlus 6 and Galaxy S9+ better handle this shot by not only producing a more natural tone, but also by better capturing the darker areas of the flower's center; it's not a gravitational singularity, as the Honor 10 implies.
Honor 10
OnePlus 6
Samsung Galaxy S9+
Video modes include the standard 1080p at 30fps and 60fps, 4k at 30fps, slow-motion (1080p at 120fps), and time-lapse (720p at 15fps).
Fast focusing didn't work well for video in testing.
Even with object tracking toggled, the Honor 10 often struggled to adapt to any sudden changes in the frame, or track fast-moving objects like passing vehicles and cyclists.
The front-facing camera features a 24-megapixel sensor, fixed focus, and a number of AI-assisted portrait lighting modes, to make your selfies look more dramatic.
Because Honor is a Huawei spin-off, the usual beauty mode effects are available, including skin smoothing, lightening, and darkening, as well as things that make your eyes look bigger or shinier.
If you've ever wanted to look like an anime shop window mannequin, you'll love these effects.
Conclusions
The Honor 10 is a solid value, offering a semblance of the flagship experience for significantly less money.
Its network and processing performance are close to pricier models (including Huawei's own P20 Pro) thanks to a Cat 18 antenna and Kirin 970 CPU.
And it looks like a flagship phone, too; that glass-and-metal back positively shimmers in the sunlight.
It lags behind Apple's and Samsung's flagships in camera performance, though, as well as the similarly priced OnePlus.
And all of this is moot for most Americans.
Unless you're willing to import it, it's much less of a hassle to pick up the OnePlus 6 or the Honor View 10 instead.
Pros
High-end CPU for a midrange price.
Fun camera effects including bokeh, 2x lossless zoom, and AI-assisted scene recognition.
The Bottom Line
The Honor 10 offers a facsimile of the Huawei P20 Pro experience for a fraction of the price.
