Honor calls the shots

The new flagship smartphone from Huawei's subbrand, the Honor 10 boasts two of the best cameras in its class.
Huawei has a lot of experience in the dual camera and the AI technology used for its prime brand smartphone and applies that to the Honor range, which targets the young generation with lower prices and of course lower specifications than Huawei flagship models.
The Honor 10 is part of the Series N, the brand’s top series, which focuses on beautiful design and good performance.
Designed by Paris Aesthetics Centre, the phone has a classy French look and its Phantom Blue model boasts an Aurora glass design that gives off a vivid gradient of colours when you look at the Honor 10 from different directions.
Huawei says the back of Honor 10 is made of 15 layers of glass to make the finish outstanding and in this it has succeeded admirably.

The 5.84-inch screen with a bezelless and full view 19:9 design has 2,280x1080pixels resolution, which is great for watching HD video clips and viewing photos.
Performance is good too, thanks to the Huawei Kirin 970 octacore processor with four cores running at 2.36 GHz and four others at 1.8 GHz.
Moreover, the processor has a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for handling AI tasks and algorithms.
The phone comes with four gigyabytes of working memory or RAM and 128 GB of internal storage and runs on the latest Android OS 8.1 with Huawei’s EMUI 8.1 user interface.

During the test, the menus and touch screen were responsive and applications ran fast and smoothly.
I used the AnTuTu Benchmark Version 7.0.9 to measure the Honor 10’s performance and it scored 203,181 proving that it is as fast as advertised. In the ever-growing online database of benchmark results from users around the world, the Honor 10 has been ranked 28th, which isn’t bad at all for a midrange phone.
It also has fast Internet connection. I tested it on TrueMove H’s LTE network and was able to download apps fast and efficiently. I used Ookla Speedtest app to measure the connection speed and found that the Honor 10 got a download speed of 59.5 Mbps and upload speed of 39.7 Mbps.
Another indicator of its good performance is that the phone can play High-Resolution Audion music files in 24bit/192kHz FLAC format smoothly. I tested the Hi-Res Audio playback with my Sony MDR1ABT wireless headphones and found the music quality was good.

The Honor 10 features a dual rear camera of 24 megapixels and 16 MP and front AI camera with 24 MP resolution.
The rear camera has very bright lens with f/1.8 aperture so the camera has good lowlight performance. In fact, the rear camera should be regarded as 16MP camera because it uses a 16MP RGB sensor and a 24 MP monochrome sensor. That means if you shoot in monochrome, you’ll get 24 MP resolution.
The dualcamera set up allows you to easily capture beautiful portraits and subjects with blurred background.
Best of all, Huawei uses Artificial Intelligence in the autoshooting mode to achieve really beautiful shots. The A auto mode, which is called just “photo”, is powered by NPU so the camera functions on artificial intelligence that allows it to recognise more than 500 scenarios in 22 categories. Huawei says several scenarios will be upgraded at a later date, including Cloudy Day, Ancient Architecture, Bicycles and more.
After the AI recognises the scene, it pairs subjects with their optimal camera settings according to image context. The AI can also recognise multiple subjects in the same image and apply localised optimisation to each subject individually.
During the test, I found that the AI functions did indeed recognise various scenes, including scenery and food and the camera automatically adjusted the settings for optimised results. 
To achieve professionally blurred background shots as good as those taken with a DSLR camera, you must use the Aperture mode. In this mode, there will be an aperture bar that you slide to adjust the aperture value. The lower the number, the more the background will be blurred.
The rear camera of Honor 10 also captures beautiful portraits using the AI system to create 3D portrait lighting with professional studio effects. The available effects are soft light, butterfly light, side light, classic light and theatre light.
AI is also used for its 24MP front camera to recognise and understand facial features more accurately. The result is professional but natural selfies.
The Honor 10 also good security too with fast Face Unlock technology. Huawei says it can unlock the phone in just 0.064 of a second. I didn’t time it but can confirm it unlocked fast and all I had to do was lift the phone. 
The Honor 10 puts the front-placing ultrasonic fingerprint sensor under the glass, creating a truly seamless unibody. The ultrasonic fingerprint sensor also let me unlock the phone.
The Honor 10 comes with 3400mAh large battery for extra power and it supports fast charging technology, allowing 50 per cent of battery charge in only 25 minutes.
The Honor 10 is available online at Lazada for Bt13,990 and at CSC, Big C, and TG Fone.

Key Specs

- Networks: GSM, WCDMA; LTE
- OS: Android 8.1 with EMUI 8.1 user interface
- CPU: Kirin 970 octacore processor (4x2.36 GHz+4x1.8 GHz), AI chipset with NPU
- Memory: 4GB RAM
- Storage: 128GB internal storage
- Display: 5.84-inch 2280p x 1080p FHD+ display with 16M colours, 432 PPI Multi touch-sensitive screen
- Cameras: 24MP + 16MP rear camera with F/1.8 wide aperture lens; 24MP front camera
- Interfaces: Audio Connector 3.5mm, USB TypeC, NanoSIM card
- Sensors: Fingerprint sensor, Digital compass, Ambient light sensor, Gravity sensor, Status indicator, Gyroscope, Hallsensor
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, 2.4GHz/5GHz; Bluetooth BT4.2; USB 2.0; GPS/Glonass/BDS
- Battery: 3,400mAh
- Dimensions: 149.6 (L) x 71.2 mm (W) x 7.7 mm (T)
- Weight: 153g