Honor X10 5G hands-on review

Last Update 2020-05-20

Introduction

Huawei’s sub-brand Honor announced the Honor 9X and Honor 9X Pro smartphones back in July 2019. Today (20-May), the Chinese tech giant took off covers from the 5G-ready Honor X10. It has launched as the cheapest 5G smartphone from Huawei’s sub-brand. Instead of calling the successor phone as Honor 10X, the company decided to settle with Honor X10 5G moniker in a bid to let consumers to not get confused with Xiaomi’s Redmi 10X 5G and Redmi 10X Pro 5G smartphones. Compared to the predecessor model, the Honor X10 arrives with many upgraded features like 5G support, larger notch-less display, flagship-grade 40MP main camera, and a larger battery with fast charging capabilities.

Price and availability

The Honor X10 starts at CNY 1,899 (Rs 20,300, $267) for the base variant with 6GB RAM and 64GB storage and the 6GB + 128GB is priced at CNY 2,199 (Rs 23,500, $309) and the 8GB + 128GB variant is priced at CNY 2,399 (Rs 25,600, $338). The X10 5G can be bought in colors like Racing Blue, Light Speed Silver, Burning Power Orange, and Speed Black. Honor will be selling customized phone cases for Honor X10 buyers. The first sale of the phone will be carried out on May 26 in China. The company did not unveil a Pro variant for the Honor X10.

Design and display

The Honor X10 has a full-view screen with a 90Hz screen refresh rate. It also supports the 90fps high frame rate of many mainstream games, and the picture smoothness has been greatly improved. In addition, the touch sampling rate of up to 180Hz also makes playing games smoother. This handset has been upgraded to 21-layer glass technology. It also brings a brand-new time-space diamond shadow design.

The four colors of racing blue, speed black, light speed silver, and blaze orange all have different 3D magic patterns. The smartphone uses a 6.63-inch full-screen with a pop-up design. The screen ratio is up to 92 percent, bringing a more comfortable and immersive look and feel. The thickness of the antenna, battery, and sound cavity has not increased. The handset supports the German TuV low blue light eye protection and opens the e-book mode with one click. The Honor X10 5G is equipped with a side-facing fingerprint sensor that can unlock the device in only 0.3 seconds.

Front and rear cameras

The Honor X10 5G comes with a pop-up selfie camera of 16-megapixel. There is rectangle-shaped camera housing at the upper-left corner of X10’s glass back. This camera setup has a Sony IMX600y 40-megapixel RYYB sensor that was previously used on Honor V30 Pro and Huawei Mate Xs. The main sensor of X10 is accompanied by an 8-megapixel ultrawide shooter and a 2-megapixel depth assist lens. The ISP 5.0 image sensor processor that is provided with Kirin 990 5G SoC can be also found on the Kirin 820. The RYYB capture more light than the traditional RGGB sensor which results in bright low-light shots. The X10 has excellent night shooting capabilities with up to ISO 153600, claims the company. The rear cameras with other features like fast autofocus and AI scene detection. The Honor X10 40MP high-sensitivity lens has the exclusive Owl 2.0 algorithm. In addition to dark light, the night scene mode works like a professional. AIS handheld Super Night Scene 2.0 records the night city exquisitely. There is also a 30-second professional mode. The Honor X10 has fast snapping capability and AI tracking technology. It can automatically identify the shooting scene and follow the focus according to the movement status. It supports a 4K ultra-high-definition video recording. No doubt, it also supports HDR algorithm. There is also a super wide-angle and macro lens shooting.

Processor, battery, and software

The Kirin 820 5G chipset powers the Honor X10 smartphone. This simply means it’s a 5G-enabled smartphone with a SA / NSA dual-mode 5G support. At the launching event, the company proudly said that the handset supports 9 5G bands such as n41, n78, n79, n1, n77, n38, n80, and n84. The handset can reach download speeds of up to 1003Mbps on 5G. It is equipped with Huawei’s Super Uplink (SUL) 5G technology that increases the uplink rate as well as a cell edge network by 412 percent. The Kirin 820 SoC offers up to 27 percent increased CPU performance and 38 percent GPU performance compared to the last generation. Its benchmark score in GeekBench is up to 9755.

The Chipset of the Honor X10 5G is coupled with LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.1 storage. There is a dedicated NM card slot on the device for additional storage. The Honor X10 5G smartphone runs the latest Magic UI 3.1 based on Android 10 OS. The phone has core technologies such as a definite delay engine, Kirin Gaming + 2.0, and graphene heat dissipation. So the game performance is improved a lot. Even if playing large games for a long time, it can be smooth. The phone draws power from a 4,300mAh battery that carries 22.5W fast charging support. The predecessor Honor 9X was packed with a 4,000mAh battery with 10W charging support. The 4300mAh battery can support online continuous 11 hours of game experience.