Huawei Honor View 10 review: A powerhouse phone that won't break the bank

The Huawei Honor 10 is a speedy Android phone with a notch. Check out our review. 

7.8

Huawei Honor View 10

$320 at Amazon

The Good

The Honor View 10 has the power and performance of a top-end phone, but with a much more accessible price tag.

The Bad

There's no waterproofing and the front-facing camera takes mediocre selfies.

The Bottom Line

With the same core specs as the excellent Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the View 10 is a great way of snagging a powerhouse phone without emptying your bank account.

I gave Huawei's Mate 10 Pro an excellent score thanks to its combination of raw power and good looks. The Honor View 10, also made by Huawei, takes almost all of the same key specs, but ditches the slick glass of the Mate in favour of a blue metal shell.

To my eye, the View 10 doesn't look as luxuriously premium as the Mate 10 Pro, but there is an ace up the View's sleeve: its price. At £450 in the UK and $499 in the US, it's a whole £250 or $300 less than the Mate 10 Pro. That's a whole lot of money saved for a phone that is functionally identical.

For similar money you could also consider the excellent OnePlus 5T , a 6-inch phone with a slick design and a clean, easy-to-use interface. The OnePlus 5T's front-facing camera performs better, but they're both powerhouses when it comes to everyday tasks.

Or you could save yourself even more and go for the Honor 7X . It has the same 6-inch display and a similar dual-camera setup on the back, but pares down the processor performance to come in with a much lower price tag. At £270 or $200, the 7X is the one to go for if you don't care about powering through the latest games.

But for that exciting combo of top-end power and good looks, the View 10 is a superb choice if you don't want to empty your wallet.

Metal versus glass

I quite like the feel of the smooth, matte metal View 10, and the deep blue tone is a welcome change from black, too. That said, the Mate 10 Pro's all-glass back looks and feels like a much more luxurious device and will certainly draw more attention when you whip it out on the bus. Whether that slick design is worth the extra cash is a decision only you can make.

They're pretty much the same size, too, and with identical 2,160x1,080-pixel resolutions, both screens are equally sharp and bright enough to do your Instagram feed justice. The Honor 7X's display is the same size and resolution too, so is a better option for you if you're after the biggest screen for the lowest cost.

The cheaper View 10 has something the Mate 10 Pro doesn't: a headphone jack. If you're loath to buy an adapter dongle, or give up the fancy pair of wired headphones you've just bought, this might be a reason to pick the Honor. The jack comes at the expense of water resistance -- something you will get with the Mate 10 Pro. That means you'll need to be on your guard around clumsy friends carrying beer.

Both phones pack Huawei's latest octa-core Kirin 970 processor, with 6GB of RAM. Unsurprisingly, they achieved almost identical scores on our benchmark tests (see the scores chart below). Navigation on the View 10 is swift, and demanding games such as Riptide GP 2 play very well.

As with the Mate 10 Pro, Huawei claims that the Kirin 970 processor is optimised for AI applications, such as real-time language translation. There aren't many apps that take advantage of this, so it shouldn't be a reason to sway you to buy this phone (or the Mate 10) over any other Android phone. All you need to know is that it's powerful enough to handle anything you'll throw at it.

There's a dual-camera setup on the back, with a 16-megapixel colour sensor twinned with a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor. Colour shots are crisp with natural colour tones. Black-and-white shots have a satisfying contrast to them that looks great without needing any additional editing. There's a depth of field effect that works reasonably well and you can choose whether the blur effect is applied -- and how strongly -- after the image is taken.

There's a 13-megapixel camera on the front, which takes decent snaps in good light, but even in our lower-light office space, it struggled to take sharp shots. That's fine for casual selfies, but the View 10 isn't among the best front-facing cameras around. The OnePlus 5T wins here, with its ability to snap great-looking selfies. On the upside, low-light shots from the main camera are bright, sharp and mostly free of image noise.

The 3,750 mAh battery is hardy enough to give you a day of use without too much trouble. It achieved around 15.5 hours on our battery rundown test, putting it a touch below the Galaxy S9 and the cheaper OnePlus 5T, both of which achieved around 17 hours on the same test. As with any phone, it's the huge display that drains the power the fastest, so keeping the brightness down is the best way to eke out the juice. Even with cautious usage you'll still want to give it a full charge every night.