Honor 10 lite - Review of a quiet mid-range smartphone

Main characteristics of Honor 10 lite

It's hard to be a mid-range smartphone. Especially if you don’t have any serious features that make you stand out from the crowd. So there must be a feature. What if she doesn't exist? If it is not there, then it must be appointed.

The Honor 10 lite has such a feature as the front camera. On official pages, in advertising videos, everywhere, the emphasis is on her. A lot of megapixels, artificial intelligence and so on.

Is the front camera magical? Decent, more than decent, but not magical.

Otherwise, the smartphone is a typical modern “two hundred dollar” middling smartphone. NFC, camera with night mode, high-resolution screen, good processor, sufficient memory.

The only rough edges I can mention are the slippery glossy body, single-band Wi-Fi, and the antediluvian type of USB. Perhaps that's all.

Price

Officially, only two varieties of Honor 10 lite are sold in Russia. The recommended retail price at the time of publication of this review is RUB 14,990 for the younger version, 3+32 GB, and RUB 16,990 for the older version, 3+64 GB.

If you buy in a company store, you will receive a gift - an Honor Band 3 fitness tracker (2990₽) or Honor Sport wireless headphones (also 2990₽).

In small stores, prices start from 11,800 rubles for the younger version. Similar prices on Aliexpress. (Be careful. If you doubt the “whiteness” of the devices or buy them abroad, be sure to check the availability of NFC, the necessary LTE bands, and support for Google services).

Appearance

We sell three colors - blue, blue, black. In China you can still find something pink and red.

The smartphone looks simple. Colored versions might be more fun. My black one, to be honest, was not at all impressive. Soapy, glossy, plastic. Don't carry it without a case, don't. Very slippery.

What’s nice is that for once the cameras don’t stick out too much. The smartphone is able to lie quietly on the table and not wobble even without a case.

There is an LED.

The card tray is located on the top edge. Everything would be fine, but next to the hole for the paper clip there is a microphone hole for noise reduction. Don't get confused where to point!

For anyone interested in the strength of the device, I recommend watching this ten-minute video.

Traditional boring details

At the top there is a cutout in which the front camera is hidden. Above it is a speaker strip. Around the same place (to the right of the cutout) is a proximity sensor.

Below the screen there is an LED and, oddly enough, a light sensor. I think this is the first time I've seen it under the screen.

Everything at the back is traditional. The cameras are moved to a corner, the fingerprint scanner is in the center.

Top edge.

Bottom edge. There is a 3.5 mm audio output, a speaker, a Micro-USB connector, and a main microphone.

On the right side there are buttons. Traditional volume rocker and power button.

On the left side there is a swimming pool, a barbecue and a bicycle, because no one reads the boring details anyway.

What can he do?

Mid-budget smartphones have finally become devices that are comfortable to work with if you are not an avid mobile gamer or are not accustomed to the smoothness of flagship interfaces.

Honor 10 Lite simultaneously has a large screen, comfortable performance for the daily routine, and a large battery that confidently lasts a day (again, without round-the-clock games and YouTube, but with moderate consumption). It has a good speaker for its price range, and the sound in the headphones is pleasant for the money. The only thing is that with one of my headphones, the smartphone was quieter than I was used to. Everything turned out fine with the headset.

Both the fingerprint scanner and the facial recognition sensor work instantly. In the smartphone settings, you can specify that after recognizing the owner’s face, another touch of the screen is required - this protects against unnecessary unlocks.

Camera

By the standards of a smartphone for a little over 200 euros, the camera in Honor 10 Lite is luxurious. More precisely, in daylight the pictures turn out good, but I think they are comparable to what is available in this category. The magic begins at night. The night shooting mode, which first appeared in the Huawei P20 Pro, has moved here. Of course, adjusted for lenses, which are much simpler here. Pictures in original resolution can be viewed in a separate gallery on the bag.

An example of night photography.

This is what a photo looks like taken in night mode and without it.

Portrait mode is interesting not only for the “depth” of the frame, but also for several flash operating modes (soft, diffuse, butterfly, bright), even for the front camera. I suspect this is the work of AI, but it turns out great.

There is also a mode for shooting with aperture priority, which has already become familiar to smartphones with two cameras, shooting with elements of augmented reality, as well as a professional shooting mode. Of course, the result depends on how “straight” the photographer’s hands are, but what depends on the device itself was done normally, although here smartphones (especially inexpensive ones) cannot yet keep up with cameras.

An example of shooting with an aperture from 2.4 to 6.3.

An example of one of the augmented reality filters.

In addition, the camera has several modes for “playing with light,” not all of which I understood how they work. Not all of them worked for me (perhaps the reason is that the firmware is not yet final, or I did something wrong). But overall I liked all this pampering. Considering that the Honor brand is targeting a young audience, all this will be in demand among them.

An example of one of the modes that adds lighting effects.

I noticed that the camera's artificial intelligence has a text recognition mode, but zoom does not work with it. That is, AI can improve the picture in this case, but only if you shoot at close range.

The front camera is 24-megapixel, I’m not sure it needs that much, but the manufacturer has perfected the selfie mode a long time ago, so there’s probably a lot of demand for it. Here you can play with “decoration” and flashes, and if you don’t go overboard in trying to embellish, the pictures look quite natural even on a laptop screen, in the example below - the “enhancer” is at maximum, and this is noticeable, but it is clear that the algorithms are working quite accurately, there are no “eaten off” parts of the face, as happened before with similar modes.

Below are some more examples of the camera in action.

Video recording occurs in 1080p. I liked how the smartphone recorded sound, but the picture, at least in artificial lighting that is not too bright, looks a little soapy and the autofocus is spoiled.

Battery

The model's 3400 mAh battery lasts for about a day on a single charge without power saving mode. My record with economical use was a day and several hours, but on average it is still about 24 hours. But for me, a smartphone has begun to replace a laptop in many tasks (in general, I can use it for the first couple of hours of the working day and then a lot of correspondence on a mobile phone), so the load on it is higher than that of a typical user. In power saving mode, the battery lasted for almost a couple of days, but at the cost of fast screen shutdown times and the shutdown of many background processes.

In the autonomy settings, you can set permissions for each application and save some more minutes or hours. But I'm not a fan of restrictions. And to be honest, I don’t like that modern smartphones with AI often abuse this issue - by default, they disable processes more aggressively than I would like. For example, every time you exit Pocket, they unload an application from memory or constantly remind you that one of the applications is using too much energy in the background. Even after I went into the settings and made sure that I needed this mode for comfortable work. But on the other hand, this scenario is better than not being able to control your smartphone. And I’m not complaining about the result in the form of autonomous operation of this particular model.

The characteristics of the smartphone do not indicate whether it has wireless charging. Usually this indicates that it is not there, but in reality I still don’t understand how things are going with it, because the device charges in a maximum of an hour and a half.

Performance

Tests of the 4pda resource showed that this chip in games demonstrates performance comparable to last year's top-end Kirin 970. It causes conflicting reviews in reviews. I tried playing Asphalt 9 on a smartphone, and overall it was fine, although the fps drop was noticeable. Facebook was also quite slow, but in my opinion it slows down wherever it can.

Unfortunately, benchmarks were not installed on the device; in assessing performance I will have to rely on subjective feelings. But a similar platform is used in Huawei P Smart 2019, a review of which is already on the website. Therefore, if details about the platform are critical to you, I advise you to familiarize yourself with it. There is also a detailed review of the new version of the smartphone shell.

We reviewed the Honor 10 Lite version with 3 GB of RAM. This one will cost 6,100 UAH at the start of sales. The hardware is completely identical to the above-mentioned model and, apparently, the devices are identical in operation.

I am not a gamer, and accordingly, I have lower requirements for smartphone graphics performance. But in general, I consider myself an active user; in most tasks, a smartphone already replaces a laptop for me (communication, watching videos, music, even some text writing comes from it), so the number of applications on it has long exceeded fifty. With this usage scenario, 3 GB of RAM will not be enough. I believe that 4 GB is just right, because, in general, at first it was comfortable to use the device, but the lack of RAM began to be felt as applications loaded the memory and decreased - it was worth getting rid of the excess.

Communication with the outside world

Single-band Wi-Fi, an outdated type of USB. Eh... I believe that someday the flight attendant will be buried completely, but obviously not this season.

Screen

Large high-resolution screen with a small teardrop notch.

A very good matrix, high brightness, nice colors.

A protective film is glued to the screen. Durable, but without oleophobic coating. At the same time, judging by the information from the support service, there is oleophobia on the screen itself.

Linking a card

Let's look at how to link a bank card to an Honor 10 Lite phone. This is done as follows:

1. the payment application opens;
2. press the “start” button, followed by the “add card” button;
3. information from a bank card is scanned by a camera or entered manually;
4. the required fields are filled in and the “continue” button is pressed;
5. if you are satisfied with the user conditions, click “accept”;
6. confirm the entered bank card details, enter the code received via SMS message to confirm the linking of the plastic product.

Battery

The battery capacity is average, 3400 mAh. Battery tests gave 178% of my conditional standard.

As you can see, the smartphone discharges very quickly in heavy games and when used as a GPS navigator. If you are not keen on either one, it will be problematic to discharge the device in a day.

With my mode of use, it lasted me about two days.

Design

The phone is beautiful. When developing it, the designers tried to make it a little unusual. The back panel is polished to a shine and resembles a mirror. If you don’t look closely, you can confuse your mobile device with a HUAWEI P Smart.

There is nothing superfluous on the display. The frames are so thin that they are almost invisible. The unibrow is also missing; it has been replaced with a small protrusion where the anterior camera is located. The frame only increases at the bottom of the display. But such a design decision does not spoil the smartphone, but, on the contrary, makes it recognizable.

The activity LED is located below the display and blinks green. Its movement was not very convenient, but after a few days of use you can get used to it.

At the presentation they talked about an impact-resistant plastic panel, but in reality this is far from the case. The back panel is made of ordinary plastic and upon impact it will shatter into fragments, and scratches cannot be removed. If you want to maintain the presentable appearance of your phone, be sure to buy a case. By the way, the smartphone comes with a standard case.

The phone's build quality is good. All the bolts are in place, nothing creaks when pressed. All the details are in place. But the most interesting thing is that the smartphone looks perfect in the hand. The side panels fit comfortably in the palm of your hand and prevent it from slipping out. The weight of the phone does not exceed 160 grams.

It is still better to carry a smartphone in a case - it will be annoying to scratch the glossy rich coating.

Huawei Honor 10 Lite as a photo and video camera

The main camera is dual, 13+2 MP (and for some reason only a modest 8 MP if AI mode is turned on). Front camera - 24 MP.

Marketers for these games with megapixels in hell, of course, are waiting for a modern high-resolution smart boiler with automatic maintenance of the level of boiling oil. The front camera is very, very good. But certainly not cooler than the main one. And it definitely doesn’t need such a wild number of megapixels.

Original full-size photographs

The main camera is quite good. Artificial intelligence, for my taste, is quite neat. But to use it or not is precisely a matter of taste. Pictures with and without him turn out quite different. It is impossible to say in advance which of them will be closer to your understanding of beauty. But with AI turned on, the sky turns out to be clearly blue.

Special thanks for the fact that you can turn AI on and off with one click; the icon is displayed on the main screen of the camera.

Original full-size photographs

There is a night mode. O-very slow and somewhat overdone. But it still saves. Without it, there’s no point in taking photographs at night; nothing meaningful comes of it.

Comparison of night and automatic mode.

As usual, I had several photo duels. I recommend you read it and will be glad if you drop a few words about the winners in the comments.

• Honor 10 lite vs Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
• Honor 10 lite vs Samsung Galaxy A30
• Honor 10 lite vs Samsung Galaxy A7 2018
• Honor 10 lite vs Vivo Y91C

What is inside?

The model is supplied to the Ukrainian market in two versions - with 3 and 4 GB of RAM. The processor is an eight-core Kirin 710 - a mid-range solution with big.LITTLE architecture (four high-performance ARM Cortex-A73 cores and four energy-saving ARM Cortex-A53 cores), manufactured using a 12 nm process technology, and with ARM Mali-G51 MP4 graphics, which supports the technology GPU Turbo. However, this does not mean that a smartphone will be a consolation for a poor gamer. Freebies There are no miracles.

In the “simplified” Honor 10, the camera was also simplified. The main camera has a dual module, 13 and 2 MP; the settings have the same shooting modes that appeared in Huawei/Honor devices this year, but more on that below. Selfie camera: 24-megapixel, wide-angle.

The smartphone has NFC, a fingerprint scanner, a facial recognition system, and support for two SIM cards (the second slot is hybrid). The model runs the current version of Android 9 Pie, on top of which the proprietary EMUI 9 shell is used.

Huawei Honor 10 Lite as a toy

You can have fun at maximum graphics settings in many games, but still not in all. In general, if you are not greedy, then everything is fine. The device is quite gaming.

FPS measurements were made using the cool Gamebench software (30 minutes of free measurements per month on a free account).

Communication, NFC and battery

Honor 10 Lite liked the stable connection even in those places where the operator signal is very weak. 4G mode is available for both SIM cards, which is important. Other wireless interfaces also work without problems, including Bluetooth 4.2 LE, GPS and GLONASS. The built-in compass and gyroscope will delight those who like to navigate not only in the urban jungle, but also on real hikes - it works quickly and accurately. The sound of the calling speaker is ringing and clear; the earpiece is also worthy of praise for conveying all shades of the interlocutor's voice.

It is especially worth noting the presence of an NFC module, the activation of which is visible in the top menu of indicators. The trendy short-range wireless data transmission feature will be useful for advanced users for contactless payments. As for the Wi-Fi module, it is implemented here only in the 2.4 GHz band with the n protocol, providing fairly high Internet access speeds.

The smartphone is equipped with a capacious 3400 mAh Li-Po battery without fast charging function. Our test unit was supplied without an adapter, so we had to charge it with a third-party power supply (from Xiaomi Mi Max) with parameters of 5 V, 2 A. The charging time from 16 to 100% was 2 hours 20 minutes. Test measurements of the smartphone's battery life in different modes showed the following results:

• Talk time on 3G network: 27 hours.
• Web surfing mode (70% brightness): 11 hours.
• Video playback mode (70% brightness): 11h 30m
• Game mode (World of Tanks Blitz) (70% brightness): 4 hours