HONOR View10 vs Apple iPhone X

Honor’s latest View10 smartphone is making waves, offering lots of hardware and software features usually available in flagship phones that are much more expensive than the View10’s $499 price tag. That even includes Apple’s latest smartphone, the iPhone X, which has a starting price of $999. That’s twice as much as the View10.

But do you really get twice the phone for the price? Let’s take a look at both the HONOR View10 and the iPhone X to see how they stack up against each other.

Design

The HONOR View10 has an all metal body with a smooth finish and rounded corners. The back includes the phone’s dual rear camera, with both lenses popping out. In front, you can find the phone’s capacitive home button on the bottom of the display with an embedded fingerprint reader, along with the normal sensors on the top of the phone screen.

The iPhone X represents perhaps the biggest design change in the iPhone family ever, with a display that takes up almost the entire front of the phone. Because the display takes up nearly all of the front, there’s no Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the bottom; instead it uses the Face ID biometric sensors to unlock the phone. 

The iPhone X also has rounded sides, and a glass back. Like the View10, the iPhone X has a dual camera setup, but the lenses are set up vertically, compared to the horizontal sensors on the View10, and the iPhone X also contains both sensors in one raised section. The phone is IP67 certified for dust and water resistance, which is not available on the View10.

Which design is better? A lot of it will come down to preference, but if you want a fingerprint scanner, headphone jack, and don’t like the notch — the View10 design is going to be more up your alley. We’ll talk a bit more about some these features and how they are missing from the iPhone X a bit later in this comparison.

Display

As we mentioned, the iPhone X’s design is very different from older iPhones, and that is most evident in its display. The nearly bezel-free front has a 5.8-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 2,436 x 1,125 and a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. The black “notch” on top of the front display contains the front-facing camera, along with the Face ID sensors.

By contrast, the HONOR View10 uses IPS LCD panel technology in its display, but has a larger 5.99-inch screen. The resolution is a bit smaller at 1,080 x 2,160, and it has a 18:9 screen ratio, versus the 19.5:9 for the iPhone X. While the iPhone X might have a better resolution, the View10 has a beautiful display that forgoes the ‘notch’ and is actually slightly larger.

Performance

The HONORView 10 runs on HUAWEI’s latest, and most powerful, in-house chipset, the octa-core Kirin 970 with its own Mali-G72 MP12 GPU, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. The Kirin 970 also uses its own NPU or neural processing unit. The NPU helps the View10 with faster image processing, improvements in battery life for the phone, and better memory management when it comes to its apps.

The iPhone X has Apple’s own, and latest, in-house chip, the six-core A11 Bionic, but it only has 3 GB of RAM and 64 GB of onboard storage in its $999 configuration (you can get the phone with 256 GB of storage for $1,149). It also has a three core GPU, and more importantly its own “Neural Engine” hardware that works in a similar fashion to the NPU on the View10.

In the iPhone X’s case, the Neural Engine helps with its Face ID sensors to learn a person’s face, along with helping to animate the phone’s Animoji features. This kind of neural and machine-learning hardware is still in its infancy, but the fact that the View10 has similar hardware to the iPhone X, at a much lower cost, is very telling.

Hardware

Now that we have compared the processors, RAM, and storage on both phones, what about the rest of the hardware features? Well, the HONOR View10 quickly has a number of advantages over the iPhone X – some of which we mentioned briefly earlier. The View10 has a headphone jack, a microSD card slot for expanding its storage, an IR blaster, and dual SIM slots, none of which are included in the iPhone X.

The View10 also beats out the iPhoneX in battery size, with a 3,750 mAh battery, compared to the 2,716 mAh battery on the iPhone X. The View10 can also charge up quickly, thanks to Huawei’s SuperCharge technology, which allows it to go up from 0 to 50 percent of its capacity with just 30 minutes of charging time. However, the iPhone X does support Qi-based wireless charging pads, which the View10 does not.

The iPhone X’s most unique hardware feature is Face ID, which uses two modules to project 30,000 infrared dots onto the owner of the phone. In theory, this means that an owner of the iPhone X will never have to worry about the phone being unlocked by someone else, as the facial sensors should identify only the owner. It’s supposed to be an improvement over the standard fingerprint sensors, which the View10 has. The View10 also has its own face unlock feature, but it just uses the phone’s standard front-facing camera. The iPhone X also has dual speakers, versus the single one on the View10.

Camera

Speaking of cameras, the HONOR View10 has a dual sensor set up in the back of the phone. There’s a 16 MP RGB primary shooter, along with a secondary monochrome 20 MP sensor that allows for images to have more detail. Both lenses have a bright f/1.8 aperture but unfortunately no optical image stabilization (OIS) on either lens.

The NPU on the View10 is supposed to help owners take better shots with the camera as well, as it can automatically choose the best camera mode from 13 different options.   The View 10 also has a 13MP front camera loaded with intelligent front shooting portrait mode for better selfie pictures.   The Kirin 970 chip supports accurate detection of faces and background, especially when you are taking selfies. The rims between people and background in a photo are clearer, resulting in better bokeh effects.

The iPhone X has two 12 MP camera sensors on the back, one with an f/1.8 wide aperture and the other with a f/2.4 telephoto aperture, with OIS features on both sensors that are not included with the View10’s rear cameras. The front camera on the iPhone X is just 7 MP but it includes Apple’s True Depth sensing technology, which allows for portrait mode to be included in that camera for the first time on any iPhone, for better selfie pictures.

Software

The HONOR View 10 ships with Android 8.0 Oreo with EMUI 8.0 on top, which is the most current version of HUAWEI’s skin. Ironically, the EMUI design looks a lot like the interface that’s available with the iPhone X’s iOS 11, with colorful looks, rounded squares for app icons, and more. If you are more familiar with the standard Android interface, the EMUI on the View10 may take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you may find it even more useful. It includes features like quick access shortcuts on the lock screen, a theme engine, and the ability to use the View10’s fingerprint sensor to navigate the screen via swipe gestures.

Of course, the iPhone X comes with the latest version of its mobile operating system iOS 11 out of the box. The iPhone X adds to the software with its support for Animoji. Owners can use the TrueDepth camera hardware in the phone to scan over 50 different facial muscle movements. These can be used to animate the many Animoji that are available out of the box for messaging, chat and more.

iOS 11 also includes features like sending money to friends via the Messages app, adding support for more advanced augmented reality games, and more. Apple is also in full control of OS updates for iOS 11, which means that owners will get those patches and upgrades faster than the View10, which may have to wait weeks or even months for OS updates.

Conclusion

The HONOR View 10 and the iPhone X are priced very differently, and as such the View10 can be forgiven for not having all of the features that Apple’s latest phone has, such as the Face ID hardware, its near bezel-free screen, its higher water and dust resistance, dual speakers, and wireless charging support. However, it is pretty amazing that the View10, with a price of just $499, still contains a lot of hardware that matches, and in some ways beats, the ones in the iPhone X.

From its speedy processor to its NPU chip, the View10’s system is essentially on par with the chip in the iPhone X, and it has more RAM and storage than the $999 version of Apple’s phone. The View10 has a larger screen, a dual camera set up that take great images on a par with the iPhone X, a headphone jack, support for adding more storage, an IR blaster, a larger battery, and dual SIM slots.

The truth is that if you spend $999 on the iPhone X, you are not getting nearly the value that you would get if you purchased the HONOR View10. Unless you absolutely are sold on iOS, the View10 is easily the better deal.