Not just another 10

FITTED with the same Kirin 970 chipset that can be found on Huawei’s flagship phones, the Honor View 10 is the most affordable way to to get your hands on an AI-enhanced smartphone.
However, what do you have to sacrifice for that lower price tag? Honestly, not much.
The Honor View 10 has a smooth aluminium body with a glass front. The lack of a glass back should not bother anyone because aluminium is less prone to shattering, and most people are going to slap a case on their phone anyway.
The face of the View 10, is a modern 2:1 ratio FHD+ 5.99in LCD. To you and me, the phone is comfortable in small and large hands, has a stretched full high definition screen that is great in most situations, but is difficult to see in bright sunlight.
I also find that the dark contrasts are just average and not as dynamic as an Amoled screen.
Inside the 157mm x 75mm x 7mm slab of aluminium and glass is the Hisilicon Kirin 970 chipset which consists of an octa-core ARM Cortex CPU and a Mali-G72 12-core GPU.
All this power is then paired with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable memory.
As my daily driver, or in other words, the smartphone I use every day, the View 10 works just as well as any top of the line phone on the market today. It takes multitasking, media streaming, and gaming all in stride.
In fact, it is designed to be futureproof and can perform well for years to come. However, it will take more than the few weeks I have with the phone to prove that.
The cameras on the View 10 are not co-engineered with any other company, but, they produce images that catch the eye even though they are not objectively the best-looking pictures.
In the time I had with the phone, I took pictures using the View 10, along with a competitor phone that objectively makes better images. I posted both pictures on social media, without edits or filters, and ask people which photo looks better.
Without telling them that these two photos were taken with two different phones or the model of the phones used, the images taken by the View 10 were consistently voted as the better-looking picture.
For technical types, the rear camera on the View 10 is a dual camera system that is made up of a 16MP (RGB) and a 20MP (monochrome) image sensor with an f1.8 aperture. The front-facing camera is a 13MP sensor with an f2.0 aperture.
According to Honor, the cameras are paired with artificial intelligence that can identify the subject and adjusts its settings accordingly.
For example, it will recognise that you are taking a picture of your pet, and increase the shutter speed so you can catch a sharp image of those restless furballs.

However, a big point of contention against the View 10 or any phone running EMUI, Huawei’s proprietary user interface, is the software. Some people like it, some people do not.
The Honor View 10 runs the Android 8.0 Oreo version of the EMUI, known as EMUI 8. The interface has matured a lot through its many iterations.
Personally, EMUI’s little quirks do not bother me, but it just feels like it is not as mature as it should be.
It has an app drawer that is not on by default, it drops subtle hints here and there about how it is improving its performance, and it has some annoying bloatware. Thankfully these can be uninstalled easily.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that the EMUI does well. For example, the Navigation dock, which is a floating dot that replaces the functionality of the navigation buttons; knuckle gestures, which lets you do things like split screen using a gesture drawn with your knuckle; and its ability to run twin apps, the second copy of a social app.
It is also worth noting that the View 10 has an audio port.
Finally, the View 10’s battery life is impressive. Even with a full day of assignments, taking pictures and videos, posting on social media, and writing stories, I ended my day with a comfortable margin of battery life left to spare.
Nevertheless, after covering an event at a water theme park, I wish that the View 10 had an IP rating.
The Honor View 10 is now available at Honor stores and authorised dealers, or online at VMall, in navy blue or midnight black, for RM2,099.
For more, visit the Honor Malaysia website.