The Honor 10 Lite was announced back in November in China and was one of the first Honor phones but it somehow manages to stay relevant in a smartphone market as fast-paced as India.
Huawei’s sub-brand Honor took 2018 by storm. It launched a wide range of devices right from the affordable segment all the way up to the high-end taking on established rivals like Xiaomi and OnePlus. The company started in journey back in 2018 with the Honor 9 Lite, the first smartphone to sport four cameras on the body (two on the front, two at the back). And while quad-cameras became more prevalent in the coming months, Honor is set to start the new year with yet another Lite series smartphone. The Honor 10 Lite will be launching in India in January and based on what we observed after using the phone for a while, it’s quite a progress from the Honor 9 Lite.
The Honor 10 Lite was announced back in November in China and was one of the first Honor phones with an U-shaped cut-out, a design choice that soon replaced the ugly notch on smartphones. Combined with that is an almost edge-to-edge display offering a screen to body ratio of over 90 percent. That alone is a big step over its predecessor. Honor has used its Chip-On-Flex (CoF) technology that debuted with the Honor 8X to shave off the chin below the display making the 6.21-inch feel as expansive as ever.
Honor 8X’s twin brother?
The Honor 8X that arrived late into the scene in 2018 was one of our highly-rated smartphones. Honor used Huawei’s new Kirin 710 SoC that managed to outperform the top-of-the-line Qualcomm chipset on phones like the Realme 2 Pro and the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2. The Honor 10 Lite relies on the same SoC for processing power. It also comes with 64GB of storage and in either 4GB or 6GB RAM variants. The phone however chose to settle for a smaller 3400mAh battery instead of the 3750mAh on the Honor 8X. If you convert the Chinese price of the phone, it comes to around Rs 14,500 and in that price range, it’s not a bad spec-sheet to look at. But specs aren’t the end all and be all. I used the phone over the weekend and while the faster processor did come into play now and again, the overall experience wasn’t really pleasant. Like many, it’s the UI that put me off. The Honor 10 Lite relies on EMUI 9 which is based on the latest Android 9 Pie update, but it’s nowhere close to how the stock UI looks and feels. Instead, you have big, ugly icons and remain restricted to using the home screen to store apps on your phone. There’s no option to enable an app drawer and I had to resort to creating folders to arrange my apps (which are a lot).
However, once you are in an app like Facebook or Instagram or even PubG Mobile, there’s rarely any lag or stutter. I managed to scroll down my feed on Instagram for long without a hitch. We also recorded the phone’s performance in PubG Mobile against the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2 and observed that while the frame rates were higher (as promised by Huawei’s GPU Turbo 2.0), it wasn’t as stable as the gameplay on Asus’ mid-ranger.
4-in-1 Pixel Binning to improve low-light
Apart from fast performance, another reason why people upgrade to better phones is the camera. And Honor offers a lot of enticing features in that department. The camera up front has a 24MP Sony IMX 576 sensor that bins four 0.9um pixels into one 1.4um pixels when the light is poor, allowing for selfies that are better-lit. While I wasn’t expecting photos like the Pixel 3, the photos were quite impressive. While the selfie did have significant noise in the darker areas, my face itself was brightly lit, and for many, that’s all that counts. The 13MP rear camera is paired with a 2MP depth sensor, something that we have become used to from Honor. The company is also using the same AI algorithms it used in the Honor 8X to improve the photos, and frankly, they look too over-processed and saturated for my liking. We will be exploring the camera abilities even more for the detailed review, but my first impressions of the rear camera was quite underwhelming.
Gradient colours to stand apart
If a convincing spec-sheet and a powerful selfie-camera isn’t enough, Honor has taken more steps to ensure anybody using the Honor 10 Lite stands out in the crowd. Honor uses a plastic chassis to keep the costs down, but the body itself has gone through an 8-layer process to bring out the gradient colours. The phone will be offered in a light blue (that blends into a steel-like hue on the top), a darker blue (that looks similar to the Honor 8X) and a regular black variant with no gradient. I like the fact that the company is offering a choice to the user who don’t prefer such shiny colours on their phone. However, the phone itself feels poorly built and I’m afraid it might not survive a drop from your pocket. It’s better to put the bundled TPU case on the phone for added protection. Notably, the display does not seem to have a protective glass layer on top.
Having said that, it’s the display that seems to be the reason to get the phone. The notch doesn’t seem to come in the way at all, leaving a lot more real estate than what most other smartphones offer in that price range. It’s a fullHD+ panel too with 1080×2340 pixels resolution, but you won’t be able to take full advantage of that. A quick check at the Widevine certification of the phone revealed that the Honor 10 Lite is unable to stream content from Netflix or Amazon Prime Video even in 720p. You will be stuck with watching content in as low as 480p which really mars the experience. Videos on YouTube however look quite bright and vibrant.
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Subhrojit Mallick
Eats smartphones for breakfast. View Full Profile
