Gadgetory

right now the smartphone industry is experiencing something of a shake-up sales of new devices have slowed down for the first time in years and innovation seems to have somewhat stagnated among the flagships but there is something interesting happening in the world of Android and you won't find it at the higher price end but rather at the mid-range devices like this on a 10 are in many ways the most exciting handsets on the market today they don't have any kind of big feature or gimmick here we find that what you get for your money is rapidly increasing and the gap between the premium devices and these middle-of-the-road errs is rapidly decreasing what's the big new feature to be excited about in 2018 the price the honour 10 is the perfect example of this and on paper it sounds almost flagship for a fraction of the price it just 399 pounds here in the UK but can it really compete with your Galaxy S 9s and your Huawei P 20s I'm Adam Snitsky and I'm going to find out in this full review stay tuned comparing the honor 10 to the Huawei P 20 is rather apt of course honor is a subdivision of Huawei and actually in many ways while way is cannibalizing its own sales in this way so to look at right away the honor 10 is very similar to the Huawei P 20 the thing you're going to notice of course is that aurora glass which is all over the back and that gives it a really shimmering shiny the eye catching look this is made by stacking 15 different layers of glass on top of each other which then bounce light back in different ways depending on the angle that you're looking at it I do imagine this won't be to everyone's taste it is a little bit ostentatious you might find a little bit garish but like I say it's different it stands out and that's a good thing and if you go for like the glacier gray and that's a little less noticeable and of course it can always take a case a ver anyways but it is nice that this is a device that you know it's a bit different stands out from the crowd on the front you've got an IPS LCD display it's 5.8 4 inches and 1080 by to 280 P the screen looks really nice it's colourful especially if you leave it in the default vivid mode not quite up there with an AMOLED display of course the blacks aren't quite as black but definitely serviceable more than serviceable in fact very pleasant to watch Media or play games on the biggest downfall for me is that it's not covered in gorilla glass this covered instead in some kind of proprietary protective glass and to me it just feels a bit more plasticy and in fact that's one of my complaints with the device here in general it feels a bit plasticky it is made of glass but it just it's a bit Hollow and it doesn't quite have that premium heft that you'll get from more expensive devices which is fair enough for the price I'm not saying it's horrible I'm just saying you can feel the price difference a little bit when you pick it up I'm also not a big fan of the haptics there's a motor in here that buzzes when you're typing and for notifications and it's so distracting and so loud that I can't use it next to my wife in bed while she's sleeping because it distracts her and wakes her up it's got really thin bezels and 19 by 9 aspect ratio a very modern design in that regard but of course it does have that notch and this is going to be divisive for a lot of people I have been surprised just how much some people dislike the knotch but the good news is that you can turn this off in the settings create a black bar on either side to hide it and whilst you can still make it out it's basically gone so I can't see a big reason to be that unhappy with it based up to you whether or not this is off-putting but for me personally it's not and I think most people are going to be fine with it what is a little bit of a strange choice is that there's a fingerprint sensor down the bottom of the display so it's got a bit of a chin and that seems a little bit odd when you've gone to all those lengths to remove the bezel at the top and then you leave the bezel down the bottom what that fingerprint sensor is there is a ultrasonic fingerprint sensor so it's something a bit different this is supposed to be faster and it supposed to work even when your fingers are wet personally I find this actually a bit slower than your regular fingerprint sensors and seeing as there's no IP rating on this I don't really know what the benefit of being able to open it with wet fingers is you can open it with wet fingers but you can't take it into a wet place otherwise the design is no fireworks no disasters you have a headphone jack which is good news for a lot of people you have the speaker grille down the bottom a single one easy to cover up with your finger but loud enough I will say it's a bit quieter than several of the other mid-range devices I've used recently especially with notifications actually in Cole's not the call volume itself but me the ringing of the phone is a bit quiet and I've missed a couple of calls as a result of course you can turn it right up but it just doesn't go quite as loud as I'd like it to but it's perfectly fine it will fill a room you can have it on watching YouTube watch it cook in the kitchen no problem meanwhile the performance day is in many ways right up there with flagships and the big reason for this is that it's powered by the ki-rin 970 chipset this is the top of the range Kirin at the moment and it's the same one found in the Huawei P 20 so you're literally getting the same performance in that regard as you do from Wiley's own flagship so I mean about cannibalizing sales it's an interesting strategy but with the state of the smartphone market right now it makes a lot of sense so that of course means that you're gonna get top of the range of performance and you'll have no problem playing all the latest games 3d games on the Play Store at the same time it will nip through the UI perfectly quickly although with some caveats more on that in a second but it's not quite up there with the Snapdragon 835 when it comes to gaming performance which is roughly the equivalent and it's certainly not quite up there with the 845 so the Snapdragon is essentially a generation ahead of Kirin right now so although it is the latest available it's not the very best performance but it's right up them for 399 pounds you really can't complain about the performance here it's backed up by four gigabytes of RAM or in India there's also a six gigabyte variant available I believe what whywe really likes to talk about when it comes to the ki-rin 970 is that NPU the new or processing unit this allows it to perform on board artificial intelligence and machine learning so it can be things like recognize things in the scene smarter memory management based on the way used the device even organize your photos so are we talking more about that as it relates to the camera in a moment but that's one advantage of having that kevin-97 the face unlock feature is super quick I think it's really good actually one of the best and I'd say that probably comes down to that NPU so in many ways this is a top performing smartphone for just 399,000 mic against performance slightly is the addition of mui or emotion UI this is an android skin that's on top of android 8.1 and it changes the look for starters which a lot of people don't like it's very colorful and very garish but fortunate you can change this by installing a separate launcher and doing other customizations but at the same time I think it also hurts the performance and you notice this when doing things like swiping through the image gallery or I noticed a bit of a stutter which I don't think would have been there otherwise considering the chipset this is running that said he knew I'd does have its benefits for instance it's apparently very good with memory management I find that it's a little bit aggressive in that regard actually but again it's a matter of opinion it's also got some cool gestures for instance a one-handed mode you can swipe to the right and then everything shrinks down you can navigate to easily like that that's quite useful there are other gestures and knuckle gesture and things so you might like you know why some people do personally I would have preferred something closer to stock the battery is two thousand four hundred million powers and that's perfectly fine to see for a day in most cases I haven't had any problems there my average screen on time is just under six hours which is fairly standard there is quick charging but no wireless charging despite this being a glass device and that brings us to the camera it's a 16 megapixel primary shooter backed up by 24 megapixel monochrome lens and on has been doing this for a long time the idea of that monochrome lens is to increase the dynamic range to provide more data to feed into those images and I would say it probably works pretty well because the contrast is good there's good variation between colors and on the whole I'm pretty happy with the way photos turn out so an F 1.8 aperture so you can do those nice depth of field effects and actually control the aperture in the pro mode as well as in the aperture mode and then at the front you've got 24 megapixel camera which is really generous really high definition for a selfie camera what everyone's talking about when it comes to this camera or what on a once ever want to be talking about is the AI capabilities this is an AI camera it says so proudly right across the back and what that means is that if you point this camera or something it will recognize what's in the shot and it will change the settings accordingly so that means if you point it at food it's gonna maybe change the setting so that there's greater detail if you point to it flowers it might turn up them saturation not actually more true to life though it's just what your phone thinks is better so it really depends on just whether you agree with the AI whether the AI likes what you like really gonna love this you're going to the good news is you can turn it off if you don't like it and it's still cool to have just a toy around with this a neat party trick unfortunately there's no optical image stabilization but there is e is and this works really well actually it's one of the best implementations of EAS I've seen probably once again you're getting some benefit from that ai functionality low-light performance is really good as well even though it loses some of the low-light features found on the Huawei p20 it's not a perfect story here though I will say that the autofocus isn't particularly good on this camera sometimes images end up looking a bit soft I will say that this isn't quite a flagship camera it's not going to compete with you know pixel two but it is a really good camera it's capable of really good shots if you're going to work at it and the reason that I like this camera more than a lot of other cameras with similar specs or similar performance is that it's got so much to play around with you've got light painting for instance which I absolutely love you've got an artist mode so yeah there's just a lot to play around with it's a really fun camera I really like that about it I like that about all on the phones so yeah on the whole this is a fun device but at the same time it's also a really impressive device in terms of what you're getting for the money I didn't want to point out some of the flaws and nitpick a little but like I say those are nitpicks I want you to know what it's like to use that isn't quite as premium as a top-of-the-range device but anything on top of what you're getting here is a luxury so there's no one needs to spend more than that the performance and what you can do with it is right up there with the best on the market and that's really quite incredible it's gonna be really interesting to see how those top-of-the-range flagships can compete with this kind of value and what they're going to do to justify those massive prices Google Samsung Apple it's your move the only problem is that there's at least two other devices that also offer incredible value for money these days around this price point those being the nokia 7 plus and the 1 plus 6 so stay tuned for comparison videos looking at how they stack up so yeah what do you think is this the start of a new era are we gonna start seeing smartphone prices fall or more importantly what do you think of the honor 10 let me know in the comments down below like this video if you enjoyed it and share it around that really helps us out we really appreciate it subscribe to the channel if you want more like this hit the bell button for notifications head over to the full written review over android authority comm where you'll find you more depth more details etc and whilst you there take a look around for we are your source for all things Android