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 coming that may pique people’s interest too.

This is the HONOR View 10, or the HONOR V10 in China.

Think of the HONOR View 10 as a sibling to the HUAWEI Mate 10. It’s got a similarly sized low-bezel display, front facing fingerprint reader,  and the same Kirin 970 SoC, which comes with the cutting edge Mali-G72 GPU. Many of the device’s internals are the same, but some trade-offs 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, and that’s not a bad thing. 1080p screens are still perfectly fine, and this particular 5.99″ FHD+ display is big, bright, and beautiful. It’s got a  big display, but maintains a comfortable form factor.

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 any estimates of how long this battery should last. 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. Anyone saying this isn’t a flagship is mistaken. This is the best processor HUAWEI currently makes.

The Mali-G72 is equally flagship-grade, with 12 cores to bust through graphically intensive tasks. We think you’ll see similar performance to HUAWEI’s Mate 10 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 it should be able to fit (most of) your music collection. This configuration is usually only seen in the highest-end devices, and we’re really glad to see it here.

The phone’s got 16 and 20 MP dual cameras on the rear. These come with a wide aperture range as well, 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’ll be able to pull out of such a small sensor. Smartphone cameras are not usually very good at that, but the results could be interesting.

These aren’t the Leica cameras you’d find in the Mate 10 or Mate 10 Pro, but they have a lot of the same features. 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 came out with “HUAWEI P9 Leica Dual Camera” watermarks, so take them with a grain of salt for now.

For you sound guys, the View 10 sports Bluetooth 4.2, and support for aptX and aptX HD. 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 supporting it).

EMUI 8.0 is the fork of Android powering this phone, and it’s based on Android 8.0 Oreo, meaning you won’t have to wait months to get all the newest Android features. Whether this phone will be updated down the road is another question, but there’s a long way to go before that.

The device will come in Navy Blue and Midnight Black once it hits the U.S., but China will get additional Red and Gold color variants.

Specs:

Gallery:

Are you excited for the HONOR View 10? It seems sure to make a splash once it lands, so stay tuned for all the latest on this phone as it hits.