Honor V10 (View 10)

Honor already has launched two bezel-free phones in the Indian market the 9i (review) and 7X (review), and now it's bringing an 18:9 display to its flagship offering as well. However, the Honor View 10 is different than most smartphones boasting bezel-less designs, and that's because it still offers a home button-cum-fingerprint scanner below the display despite sporting minimal bezels. The authentication is fast and accurate, and while the hardware button does mean that the phone's screen-to-body ratio isn't as high as it could've been, it does make the usage easier as you don't have to pick up the phone from the table to unlock it (as is the case if the fingerprint reader is located at the back).

Huawei (and its sub-brand Honor) has established itself as one of the very few brands that offer a refined dual camera experience. And the Honor View 10 takes that a notch above with the use of AI. But before we talk about that, here's what you get with the phone in the camera department: a 16MP f/1.8t primary shooter paired with a 20MP sensor at the rear. Interestingly, the brand continues with its usual RGB + monochrome setup, along with offering the features offered by other dual camera-toting smartphones. Along with a portrait mode, the cameras can also offer the optical zoom-like capability of up to 2x.

With the View 10, Honor has made a leap in terms of the software too. After Emotion UI 5.0, it has jumped directly to v8.0 to match theAndroid 8.0 Oreo platform it utilises. At first glance, you won't find anything different than the previous iterations of the custom skin. It continues with a unified homescreen and app drawer (though you can enable the app menu from settings), and comes with quite a few preloaded apps. Some of the preinstalled titles are quite useful Phone Manager for instance, gives you a one-stop overview of data usage, app permissions, battery status, etc., while Smart Controller lets you control other electronic appliances via IR.

Being a flagship, the Honor View 10 comes equipped with a top-of-the-line processor. Huawei's in-house Kirin 970 SoC ensures that the device is able to handle any task thrown at it. It does a great job with not just basic navigation, but while running heavy apps too. To ensure smooth multitasking experience, the chipset is clubbed with 6 gigs of RAM, and switching between apps is instantaneous as well. The smartphone didn't show any sign of slowing down even when we had 15 to 20 apps running in the background. With the Mali-G72 MP12 graphics engine, gaming is an enjoyable affair too. We often lost track of time while playing titles like Sniper Ghost Warrior, and the good thing is that the phone doesn't heat up even after long sessions. The game suite makes the playing experience better, though the loudspeaker's output isn't impressive. Even more so as because of the speaker's placement, the audio tends to get muffled.