Honor 10 Launch and hands On: Kirin 970, More AI, MOre Notch

In a world filled with rectangular blocks with displays, it takes great effort to differentiate. The new 10th Honor, launched today at an event in London, follows the trend of premium smartphones in 2018: more views, and adds a level. Underneath the hood is the latest HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset, as seen on Huawei Mate 10 and P20, with additional AI functional blocks to accelerate certain applications built on machine learning algorithms. The Honor Line has always been seen as a more cost-effective way for most of the latest features of Huawei's major brands, and this year is no different.

From the front, visually, identifying the notched phone you see is like identifying a plane in the distance - all the notches look more or less the same without knowing any small details. Honor 10 is similar in that case, featuring a 5.84 inch LCD IPS screen with 2280x1080 resolution for 19: 9 and 432ppi aspect ratios. The screen uses the Honor TrueColor naming scheme, and is rated at 96% NTSC (sRGB mode not specified). At the top is a notch, with front facing camera, almost circular speakers, and a light detector.

Over the past two generations, Honor's main line of smartphones (just called by number, like Honor 8 and Honor 9) were impressed by the color choices. Honor 8 colors in metallic blue is one of the first times I really appreciate the good colors on a smartphone. The Honor 9 does not stretch my emotions so far, but Honor 10 achieves a good balance, with the current version of 'Phantom Blue' like Honor 8 blue but with a greener tinge in general, moving towards a grue-like appearance, then at the extreme angle looks purple.

Uninterrupted homogeneous plain of color is my trend of being a different fan. Other colors available are Phantom Green (mixture of navy blue and green jewelry), Midnight Black and Gray.

The hardware on the back consists of a dual camera design, with a 16MP main color sensor (f / 1.8 aperture) incorporated by a 24 MP (f / 2.4 aperture) black and white sensor to help auto focus phase detection, contrast focus, and Photography such as Bokeh. It has not been mentioned whether the camera has an OIS, or if the smartphone uses Huawei's AI Assisted Stabilization (AIAS, or AIS) using onboard chips to stabilize shooting or help take longer shooting without a tripod mount. At the back of Honor has put the words 'AI Camera', just in case you forget. Video recording goes up to 4K30 or 1080p60, either in H.264 or HEVC, which means that Honor has decided not to apply the slo-mo mode as seen on higher cost flagships. The front camera is a 24MP selfie camera with f / 2.0 aperture and support for 1080p video and unlocks the front face.

The configuration we received using Kirin 970 on standard frequency, with Mali Mali-G72MP12 graphics, and comes with 4GB LPDDR4X, and 128GB of storage. The exact configuration will be given at launch, so we might expect to see the 4/64 and 6/128 (or 6/256) versions as well. One of the main points for our briefing on this smartphone is how little information about the specifications we gave before launch - we were telephoned a few days earlier along with the first draft of the review guide, and our next question has been missed. This is most disorganized. Therefore we are not currently sure about the memory frequency or storage type (eMMC, UFS) used here.

For the battery, Honor 10 is equipped with 3400mAh unit, suitable we are told for X-hour usage, and equipped with Huawei Supercharge up to 5V / 4.5A with suitable charger. While the design uses an aluminum frame with the front and rear Corning Gorilla Glass (unnamed), no wireless charging. The fingerprint sensor is on the front (very disappointing to me), which Honor states is the industry's first ultrasonic fingerprint sensor under glass for smartphones. The Wi-Fi module allows dual-band 802.11ac with BT 4.2. At the bottom there is a Type-C USB port (USB 2.0 speed) and a 3.5mm headset jack. Above is IR blaster.

After using the device for a few days, the direct feature that caught my attention was the AI Camera mode. It can recognize 500+ scenarios in 22 categories in real-time with viewfinder, such as P20, but Honor states that Honor 10 uses industry's first Semantic Image Segmentation technology, which enables it to identify multiple scenarios in a single image, and allows users to manipulate each scenario independently. This is different from other AI acceleration scene recognition tools that can only detect one scenario per frame. For me, since I do not personally use Mate 10 or P20, the way AI mode detects scenes and improves photos basically day and night.

Compulsory portrait photos (using the rear camera, since the AI camera mode is not used on selfie cameras) with my work glasses adjusting the photos to move me to the center and automatically apply the bokeh shape to make sure I'm the subject of the photo. By default, a small number of beauty modes are also applied to smoother skin and skin lightening.

in a low artificial light environment at night, this Katamari photo with AI mode shows more detail and color depth. He is of course identified as a cat. We can see that the modes apply some additional vignetting as well.