Test and review of Honor 10i: camera phone with precious shimmer

At the end of 2022, Honor became the most popular smartphone manufacturer in Russia. This was largely due to the success of the flagship Honor 10, which the company consolidated with the subsequent release of a more affordable Lite version. Honor 10i was recently announced, a review of which is offered to your attention. This smartphone has a lot of compromises that the developers made for the sake of a triple camera with a wide-angle module. Are they worth it? Let's figure it out.

Design: mysterious play and flashes

Honor 10i continues the line of “shimmering” smartphones, which began with the older models of 2022 - Huawei P20 and P20 Pro. The designers went to great lengths and created a real northern lights display on the back cover of the case. We received a device for review in an interesting “phantom red” color, which is a gradient between bright pink and purple. Phantom Blue and Midnight Black options are also available and look just as good.

The device is packaged in a thin aluminum case with narrow frames. Unlike Honor 10, which got a notch, Honor 10i received a neat notch. The smartphone is a full-fledged six-incher, so with dimensions of 154.8 x 73.64 x 7.95 mm it weighs 164 grams. At the same time, it is deceptively weightless in the hand due to its incredibly smooth, streamlined body.

The glossy body is both the charm and the curse of the device. You need to hold the smartphone firmly in your hand, otherwise you won’t be able to avoid falls and new gray hairs on your head, especially since the device does not claim IP certification or water resistance. In addition, the semi-precious case has problems with oleophobicity: despite the film glued by the manufacturer itself, fingerprints stick like flies to adhesive tape. So the device is clearly assigned a textured case and protective glass, which reduces the designers’ efforts to almost nothing.

Equipment: with memory card, but without Type-C

In addition to the phone itself, the kit includes a charger, a simple case (we were not given one, but it is included in the commercial kit) and a paper clip, since the smartphone has a Dual-SIM slot. To the envy of those who bought Honor 10, support for microSD cards has returned to the new model. Alternatively, you can install two SIM cards in the slot - one nanoSIM and one microSIM.

The big disadvantage that we have to note is that the smartphone is charged via microUSB 2.0 (not even USB Type-C 2.0, like Honor 10). This fact is, of course, disappointing - but at the same time it is a very practical solution. After all, this means that the iridescent six-inch can be charged with any old charger lying around in the closet.

The standard 3.5 mm headphone jack has also been retained. As for wireless communication interfaces, the characteristics here are satisfactory: Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2 are supported. There is GPS/GLONASS for navigation and NFC for contactless payments, and the device confidently picks up 3, 7 and 20 of the Russian LTE frequencies.

Memory

In terms of memory parameters, the Honor 9 and 10 models are similar. The difference is that the “ten” provides not only a 64 GB version, but also a 128 GB version. The operating speed of both modifications is the same, the possibility of expansion is not provided.

The manufacturer initially indicated that the Honor 10 would only have 4 GB of RAM. A little later, a smartphone with 6 GB RAM was announced.

The 10i and 10 Lite modifications have 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal memory. It can be expanded up to 512 GB via microSD, which is not covered by application installation. This point is not critical, since the onboard memory is quite enough for system and installation programs.

Display: smart brightness with a large margin

The diagonal of Honor 10i is 6.21″, and the display resolution is 2340 x 1080, which gives a pixel density of 415 PPI. This is still a good result in terms of image clarity and eye safety, but it is lower than the flagship (Honor 10 has 432 PPI). But the rule “fewer inches are better, but more pixels” works here almost unnoticed by the user’s eyes - we’ll explain why.

The Honor 10i, like the flagships Huawei P20 and P20 Pro, has an LTPS display - an IPS display produced using the latest low-temperature polysilicon annealing technology. The screen occupies 83.31% of the smartphone area. LTPS displays have excellent color rendition (this particular one has 1.67 million colors, 96% of the NTSC color gamut) and brightness margin, since most of the liquid crystal cell allows light to pass through.

Our lux meter estimated the brightness of the smartphone “at maximum” at 488.7 cd/m2. In addition, there is automatic brightness adjustment - after about 1-2 seconds from the start of use, “dawn comes” on the screen. “Smart brightness” does not try to be smarter than the user and takes into account the activity when working with a smartphone: you started tapping on the screen - the brightness became higher, you put the phone down - the screen fades. So we didn't have the slightest desire to turn it off.

Video recording

The smartphone can record video in two options: 30 or 60 frames per second. In this case, the resolution will always be 1920 x 1080 pixels. In both cases there is no image stabilization. However, the video recording pleases with a high-quality image, even in 60 FPS mode. The soundtrack is also not bad - it copes with violent gusts of wind quite successfully.

By the way, when shooting at 30 frames per second, you can switch on the fly from the main camera to the wide-angle one. Sometimes this can be very useful.

Performance and Software

Let’s immediately say hello to all Yandex lovers: Honor 10i from the main screen welcomes you with Yandex services, “Ya.Browser”, Yandex.Zen and a search bar with built-in Alice. If you think this is unnecessary, the good news is that it can all be easily removed.

In general, in terms of bloatware, Honor is becoming increasingly difficult. This applies, firstly, to Huawei's various after-sales service applications. The HiCare, AppGallery, Huawei Device, Honor Store and Honor Club applications are just shortcuts that open the corresponding Huawei ecosystem websites in the browser, but they take up 40 percent of the menu. In addition, in Russia, in addition to Yandex, Honor has a partnership with Facebook, Booking.com and, suddenly, “Yula” - so you will also find all these applications pre-installed.

Secondly, smartphones of the “tenth” series, even when turned on for the first time, offer to quickly fill up the memory. One of the stages of setting up your phone is installing “recommended” applications from among the most popular ones on Google Play for Russia. This is not to say that this is useless: among the recommended applications there are, for example, Vkontakte, Sberbank-Online and Instagram.

As for performance, the Honor 10i is much lower than the brand’s flagships. The installed 8-core HiSilicon Kirin 710 processor has a frequency of 2.2 GHz, the Mali-G51 MP4 graphics processor is 1 GHz and 4 cores. We got a model with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal memory, but there is also a 6/128 GB option.

In AnTuTu, our device scored 132,003 points - half as much as the Honor 10 with the flagship Kirin 970 processor (213,381 points). Everything is fine with the OS version of the Honor 10i: it runs the latest Android 9.0 Pie. But plus and minus, as you know, gives a minus. A heavier OS with reduced processor performance results in slower applications. Especially games: in the AnTuTu 3D Benchmark the graphics slow down quite unpleasantly for the eyes.

Processor capabilities

To correctly compare Honor phones, you need to study the features of the processors that the models are equipped with. Common features include high performance, no heating during operation, and the presence of a “smart” assistant that reduces energy consumption. Other characteristics are indicated in the table.

Camera: a gift from the 2022 flagship

But Honor 10i is not a gaming smartphone either: if you are looking in this direction, it is better to try Honor Play. According to the manufacturer, this is a camera phone - and indeed, even in comparison with the flagship, it has a more advanced camera. The device has a triple rear camera - like the older flagship Huawei P30 released this spring (but, of course, much less powerful). Three lenses with apertures F/1.80, F/2.40 and F/2.40 have a resolution of 24 MP, 8 MP and 2 MP, respectively, and the front camera is as much as 32 MP. Photo resolution - 5632 x 4224, video - 1920x1080.

The camera has 15 shooting modes, including video, each with its own characteristics. Photo mode is equipped with an artificial intelligence function. It consists in the fact that when pointing the camera, it determines what exactly you are shooting - for example, objects, plants, cars - and adjusts its settings to better capture these particular objects. We tried the smart camera on different types of objects - see the results in the gallery.

In addition, it supports night photography, beautified portrait photography, wide aperture (bokeh effect), as well as panoramic photography, time-lapse photography, slow-motion photography, lighting effects, filters, frames, watermarks, HDR mode (high resolution) and Pro mode for those who prefer to configure the camera themselves. See how it all works.

Frontal

The front sensor pleases with (attention) 32 megapixels! Hence the excellent detail of the picture. I took a special photo of my beloved self indoors. This is what happened.

If there is not enough light, we take at least 3-4 photos at a time. This is a strictly mandatory recommendation. Still, blurry pictures are not uncommon. However, on the street and during the day you don’t have to bother with this.

Battery: durable in natural conditions

As for the battery, the Honor 10i has a 3400 mAh lithium polymer battery, which has a surprisingly long battery life. In order to discharge the smartphone naturally (web surfing, photo and video shooting, communication in instant messengers and social networks, active Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile Internet, GPS and mobile payments) it took us more than a day and a half - specifically, exactly 40 hours !

I had to call in a load script to help, and in automatic mode with the screen always on, the device “deflated” in 7 hours 45 minutes. This is an average result for such a large battery. The flagships last at least an hour and a half longer. It should be noted that the smartphone has deep discharge protection. It never discharges to full zero: at 2% the device automatically turns off.

The smartphone supports fast charging technology, but not advanced. However, the outdated microUSB charging connector has an effect - the battery charges more slowly than the flagship Honor and Huawei. It took us 2 hours and 5 minutes to charge the battery from 2 to 100%.

Sound

Budget smartphones are usually equipped with not the most interesting speakers. And this is, in principle, easy to forgive. What you really want is to hear how the earpiece helps the main speaker when playing video. The sound quality here is enough to accompany videos on the Internet, but I would like to hear it on both sides of the screen. You will still want to use headphones for music.

And this will not be a problem, because there is a place for the usual jack for wired headphones. Unfortunately, such a smartphone will not be able to use the full potential of good headphones, but nevertheless, the capabilities here are sufficient for listening to music while walking or in a long line.

The volume of the speaker is enough to hear the interlocutor near the road. The microphone also conveys the owner’s voice well, and the noise reduction system will try to turn off the microphone when the user is silent.

Characteristics and test results of Honor 10i 128 GB