Honor, a subsidiary of Huawei, is pulling a OnePlus. Its latest flagship smartphone packs similar features from Huawei’s high-end Mate 10 Pro, but the Honor View 10 (also called Honor V10) won’t break the bank. The phone was announced in China towards the end of 2017, and it went on sale in India, the U.K., Spain, Italy, France, and Germany on January 8. Now, it’s finally coming to the U.S.
You can check out our Honor View 10 review to learn more about the smartphone. Honor also announced the Honor 7X, a $200 budget phone that’s available in the U.S. — read our Honor 7X review to learn more.
Release and price
Pre-orders for the Honor View 10 are officially underway, with shipments and full retail availability kicking off on March 22. It will cost $500 — putting it on equal footing with the OnePlus 5T. It comes in midnight black and navy blue color options, and you can order one now from the Honor website. Honor is also releasing Honor Sport Bluetooth Earphones, which are also available now for $40.
The phone is also available in the U.K., India, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, costing 500 euros or 450 British pounds. The Honor V10, which is the device’s original name, released in China on December 4 in black, gold, blue, and red.
Specifications and features
The Honor V10 is closely related to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. Honor is to Huawei what Mini is to BMW, and the two regularly share technology. The Honor 9 and the Huawei P10, for example, have very similar features.
The screen measures 5.99 inches and has an 18:9 FullView aspect ratio, with a 2,160 x 1,080 pixel resolution, which matches the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. This means the body has small bezels above and below the screen. However, Honor has taken the unusual design decision to put the fingerprint sensor on the front, squeezing it into the small bezel below the screen. The Mate 10 Pro has the sensor on the back, and even OnePlus shifted to a rear fingerprint sensor for the redesigned OnePlus 5T.
There is excellent news on the processor. It’s Huawei’s Kirin 970 chip inside, and it comes with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for improved artificial intelligence. The NPU takes artificial intelligence processing out of the cloud and onto the device, improving speed and security, and adding cool features like instant image recognition in the camera. Like the Mate 10 Pro, the V10’s camera will adjust the settings automatically to best suit the scene you’re capturing with the camera. You can check out our camera shootout between the Honor View 10 and the Huawei Mate 10 Pro to see how it fares against a flagship phone, and take a look at our camera comparison with the OnePlus 5T to see how it stacks up against the competition.
On the back is a dual-lens camera with an f/1.8 aperture, a 16 megapixel RGB lens, and a 20-megapixel monochrome lens. The front camera has 13-megapixels and apparently also makes use of the NPU’s abilities, although we’re not sure on the details yet. It’s also used for a face unlock system. Other Honor V10 features include Android 8.0 Oreo with EMUI 8.0 over the top, a fast-charging 3,750mAh battery, dual-SIM and a MicroSD card slot, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, and USB Type-C recharging.
Update: We’ve added the release date and pricing for the U.S.
