Honor unleash View 10 and 7X smartphones in London

Yesterday I was present at the Honor event near Blackfriars and the River Thames. There they unveiled a pair of smartphones just in time for Christmas. We were all expecting to see the 7X but we were also introduced to the brand-new flagship Honor View 10.

Honor officially took the wraps off the competitively-priced, near bezel-less 7X and the top of the range View 10 at their global launch at The Mermaid Centre in Puddle Dock.

Even though the V10 was actually launched in China around a week ago, I for one was not really expecting it to appear here.

Honor View 10

In its broadest terms, the View 10 is effectively a budget version of the recently launched Huawei Mate 10 Pro. There are some compromises to be made, obviously, but when you divvy-up the savings, the View 10 is pretty amazing for the money.

The View 10 is packing a 5.99-inch LCD, 2160×1080 pixels screen, whereas the Mate 10 Pro is equipped with AMOLED. However, you still get the ‘FullView’ 18:9 ratio, and minimal bezels both at top and bottom.

The View 10 has a fingerprint sensor under the screen, similar to the Mate 10.

You get the glass front and back, and Honor’s now famous colour schemes. This, of course, includes the popular blue variant.

I generally tell people that Honor is the youthful, more friendlier-priced version of Huawei. That doesn’t mean that they look or feel like poorer cousins though. Far from it. Both of these new phones look great.

AI

There was a lot made of the phone’s intelligence. Much of this comes by way of the Kirin 970 chipset. This is the same as loaded in the Mate 10 stable and also comes with a number of AI functions that Huawei included thanks to the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This hands the View 10 handy chops such as automatic scene recognition for the camera.

The new Kirin 970 features an octa-core ARM Cortex CPU and a first-to-market Mali-G72 12-core GPU.

Additionally, there’s facial recognition support included as a new feature. This enables the phone to protect the lockscreen by hiding information from the wrong eyes.

The facial recognition, as well as a bunch of security features, can also take on Apple’s Animojis. I realise that this was an Honor show but their 3D Facial Animation did look better – even picking up the the model’s tongue sticking out and getting the panda to do the same.

Software and specs

Android Oreo and Emotion UI 8 (EMUI 8) come ready out of the box. The UK will be getting the 6GB RAM version of the View 10 with 128GB of storage. Naturally, there are various configurations of storage and RAM depending on the particular market, ranging from 4GB of RAM, and 64GB storage.

It was good to see that the View 10 is rocking the hybrid SIM tray. Here you can utilise it for one or two SIMs or a SIM and micro SDcard. A single SIM model is also available.

Those dual SIMS can handle “Simultaneous surfing and calling” through both 4G and VoLTE.

The battery comes in at 3,750mAh. This is less than the Mate 10 Pro but it has enabled Honor to shave almost 1mm off the thickness.

The phone also can be quick-charged via its USB-C port up to 50% in 30 minutes.

Camera

The View 10 is kitted out with 16 and 20-megapixel sensors at the rear with f/1.8 lenses.

There is no OIS (optical image stabilisation) here but, in most conditions, you should be fine.

There’s a stack of clever scene recognition modes too. These range from food to cats – so, the entirety of your news feed should look fantastic.

Up front is a 13MP snapper.

Orchestra mode

If you think that youths on the bus playing music through one mobile is bad, just wait until they see this. The View 10 is able to sync the music it is playing over multiple devices so that all the synced phones’ speakers are used.

Kill me now.

More usefully, the 3.5mm headphone jack is still present.

Translation

Rounding things up is a neat translation tool. Just take a photo of a sign in another language and it can be translated to English — a similar function to Google Lens.

Availability

The Honor View 10 hits the shelves on January 8th 2018 for £449 so expect more at CES.

Honor 7X

This was actually the first phone out at the event and the one I came home with.

The 7X comes in at an extremely pleasing price point but also manages to flaunt the skinniest of bezels.

Screen

So, with Honor’s ‘FullView’ display technology and a 5.93-inch full HD+ (2160×1080 pixel) LCD panel, it looks a lot more expensive than it actually is.

This is also an 18:9 ratio screen. Something else more often seen on flagship phones.

The taller display makes more sense for split-screen shenanigans so Honor has included one-key screen split skills. This way you’ll be getting the most from Android’s multi-tasking.

Games also benefit from this near-bezeless display.

Specs

The Honor 7X is powered by the Kirin 659 chipset. This is paired with 4GB of RAM and 32, 64 or 128GB of internal storage (depending on market). These can all be expanded by SD card.

The 3,340mAh battery might appear a bit meh, but it should be enough to get it through a normal day.

This is all wrapped up in an all-metal design, with curved 2.5D glass at the front, and a rear design reminiscent of the premium Honor 8 Pro released earlier in the year.

Dimensions of the phone are 156.5 x 75.3 x 7.6mm, and a weight of 165g.

Cameras

The phone has the now-expected dual-camera configuration. However, things are different to the flagship Honors. Here you get a primary 16-megapixel sensor accompanied by a 2-megapixel sensor. The latter is here more for depth detection.

The good news because of this set-up is that you are still able to capture the popular bokeh/portrait modes people now demand from their phone.

On the subject of portraits and such, the 7X can adjust the beauty settings according to gender. So, men look “more handsome”, etc. Not sure if this is needed, or a good idea.

Phase Shift Auto Focus (PDAF) enables focus times of just 0.18 seconds, which reduces the chance of missing that priceless moment.

Takes the biscuit (soon)

Android Nougat (Android 7) and EMUI 5.1 is installed with an update to Oreo and EMUI 8 following very early in the new year.

This is a little disappointing given Oreo (Android 8) has been out for a while, but it’s not as bad as the fact the phone still has micro-USB port. Not quite ready for USB-C at this price it seems. At least you’re likely to still have plenty of spare cables and such lying around for it.

On a more positive not, the 3.5mm headphone jack is still here too!

Colours and availability

The Honor 7X is available in black, blue or gold.

The phone will go on sale from December 5th for £269.99.