The Honor 10 looks like a work of art, not just a slab of sober metal and glass like so many phones available today
It’s the phone more people have asked us about, after taking it out of a pocket, than any other this year. And with good reason.
A new kind of phone design
Honor hasn’t traded away functionality or ease of use as a result, though. The Honor 10 is a 7.7mm thick shell of two panes of curved toughened glass with an aluminium frame in-between.
This sounds familiar, but we guarantee you’ve not seen anything quite like the Honor 10. Turn the phone and you’ll see a light show of bright blue streaks on a darker blue bed, transitioning to purple at an oblique angle.
It’s bold. It’s dazzling. But it’s also subtle, turning an almost turquoise blue when you look at the Honor 10 indoors without any bright light around.
Meet Aurora Glass
How has Honor managed this? The Honor 10’s back is known as Aurora Glass. It’s inspired by the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights.
This is the natural phenomena many travel to Svalbard in Norway and Reykjavik in Iceland to witness first-hand. Particles from solar flares react with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating some of the same colour tones you see on the Honor 10’s rear.
Thankfully, you don’t need to buy a plane ticket or wait for a solar flare to see the same effect here.
The Honor 10’s Aurora Glass uses 15 layers that play with light as it reflects off the back. Using a process called nano-scale optical coating, the glass has a prismatic effect that creates the phone’s dance of colour and light beams.
Phantom colour
Honor calls the Honor 10’s finish Phantom Blue, which perfectly represents the way its tone shifts from blue to purple at an angle. The effect is far more interesting to look at than the flat glass finishes so many other phones use today.
Honor has colour-matched the aluminium on the sides too. If the tone looks a little too bright to your eyes, you can also get the Honor 10 in grey.
Sometimes we find ourselves turning the phone back and forward to watch the Aurora Glass go. It’s a lot more relaxing than poring over your Twitter or Facebook feeds.
This is not the only reason the Honor 10 stands out, though. The phone comes with a software theme based on the northern lights, letting you match the front and back, and its display has a notch too.
This gives the 5.84-inch screen thoroughly modern contours and a 19:9 aspect ratio, letting the display flood right to the edges of the Honor 10’s front. Not keen on notches in phones? You can hide the notch with a black bar, but even then the extra display space isn’t wasted. It’s used for your notification, battery and signal icons.
If you want to experience the dazzling Honor 10 for yourself, you can buy one with an amazing 128GB storage for just £399.99.
