Honor UK Launch Event: Affordable 7X and flagship View 10 unveiled

Honor has today unveiled two new smartphone in time for Christmas at a lavish launch event near the River Thames in London. The first we already knew about, but the second came as a (slight) surprise. Introducing the brand-new flagship View 10…

In reality, with the V10 launch in China around a week ago, the View 10 wasn’t actually that much of a surprise. Yet despite briefing the media about the 7X ahead of the event today, Honor officials kept their lips very tightly sealed when it came to talking about the View 10.

• Read about the Honor 7X here, the first affordable phone with a large 6-inch near bezel-less screen.

The View 10 is effectively a budget version of the recently launched Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and will save you quite a bit of money if you’re willing to accept a few compromises when it comes to specs. Compromises that are pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.

• Read my in-depth Huawei Mate 10 Pro review.

For example, instead of AMOLED, the display is now only LCD, but it still has the same size (5.99-inches) and resolution (2160×1080 pixels). The phone retains a ‘FullView’ 18:9 ratio, with minimal bezels top and bottom. Unlike the Mate 10 Pro, however, the fingerprint sensor is moved to the front, similar to that of the Mate 10 positioning.

Also like the Mate 10 Pro, the View 10 has both glass front and back, and retains Honor’s recognisable colour schemes – including the popular blue variant that is almost a trademark colour for the brand. Honor variants of Huawei handsets might be cheaper to buy, but they never look cheap. This is no exception.

Intelligence built-in

The View 10 is powered by the same Kirin 970 chipset, complete with a number of AI functions that Huawei included on the Mate 10 family thanks to the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), such as automatic scene recognition for the camera.

In addition to that, there’s now facial recognition support included as a new feature to protect the lockscreen from showing information to the wrong eyes.

Android Oreo and Emotion UI 8 (EMUI 8) comes preloaded out of the box, and there are various configurations of storage and RAM depending on market, ranging from 4 or 6GB of RAM, to 64 or 128GB storage. (Update: It seems we’ll be getting the 6GB RAM/128GB storage version).

Whereas the Mate 10 Pro has no memory card expandability, Honor has retained the hybrid SIM tray, for one or two SIMs or one SIM and one memory card. A single SIM model is also available.

At the time of writing it was not known what 4G speeds are supported, or if the dual-SIM model will support dual 4G access (Update: It does). Going by the Chinese V10 specs, it seems likely the phone will have a slower modem. VoLTE and VoWiFi support is also included.

The battery is down in capacity slightly from 4,000mAh to 3,750mAh, which allowed Honor to shave almost 1mm off the thickness. I hope with the standard Huawei power management tools working alongside Android Oreo, it will still be possible to get through a whole day without feeling nervous half way through. This of course can’t be known until a full review is made of the phone.

Honor also promises that the phone will remain responsive throughout ownership, using the same intelligence that is already present on other Huawei and Honor smartphones.

Camera

Finally, the dual camera has a few minor differences. Firstly, there’s the lack of Leica branding – but that’s a given as the branding is reserved exclusively for Huawei branded phones, even if Honor was responsible for kicking off the whole dual camera thing with the Honor 6 Plus.

Secondly, there’s no optical image stabilisation. But, Honor 9 owners will already know that the lack of OIS won’t make much of a difference in a lot of conditions (like when there’s good light) and the combined 16+20-megapixel setup should still beat the Honor 9’s 12+20MP configuration, especially thanks to improved f/1.8 aperture lenses.

Honor will of course not be making any direct comparisons to its Huawei flagship, but the reality is that the View 10 allows for a very similar experience as the Mate 10 Pro, but for less money.

This means you now get a good choice. If you need the highest spec, get the Mate 10 Pro. If you’d rather a few more quid in your pocket, consider this instead.

More info: Honor website

Specs comparison table

Hands-on Photos

Event photos