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Battery life
- 3,400mAh battery
- Power-saving features
- No fast charging
At 3,400mAh, the Honor 10 Lite’s battery is bang-on what we’d expect it to be given its big screen.
In real-world use, the phone easily made it through a full day – around 7am to 10pm – with about 15% left in the tank. Meanwhile, 90 minutes of full-brightness Full HD video playback drained it by 19% – not an amazing result, but respectable enough.
Honor also gives you a huge amount of control over how your battery gets used, with Power Saving and Ultra Power Saving modes, easy-to-access toggles for connectivity, and control over which apps launch automatically.
It doesn’t charge particularly quickly, taking more than an hour and a half to get from 0-100%, and there’s no wireless charging either; again, though, we have to stress that for the price this is perfectly competitive.
Camera
- 13MP + 2MP dual camera
- Excellent, though stylized night mode
- 24MP selfie camera
The range of shooting modes is also staggering – from Automatic, to AI mode for advanced scene detection, right through to semi-automatic and a 100% manual mode, called Pro Mode.
Shots taken in auto mode are fair. With no image stabilization, handshake is compensated for relatively well, and detail isn’t bad for a phone in the 10 Lite’s price range.
Pictures are, however, high in contrast, losing a lot of nuance in the darks and lights that higher-end phones can capture.
This is compounded when you shoot in AI mode, which intelligently detects scenes and filters your shots accordingly. Sometimes, this mode nails it – sunsets for example look spectacular – while in other situations it’s totally overkill.
Thankfully, you can toggle the mode on or off after you take a photo with it set to on, so we’d suggest you use it in that way – after taking a shot, if it all looks a bit over-processed, tap the AI button and it should chill things out a bit.
What’s much more impressive than the standard or AI modes is the 10 Lite’s Night Mode, which is capable of capturing long-exposure low-light shots, in a similar fashion to Night Sight on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL.
Pictures taken in this mode are loaded up with incredibly bold, HDR-esque, edge-sharpened details which won't be for everyone, but the takeaway is that they pack much more detail than anything else under £300 / $400. The heavily stylized look could also be seen as cool, so while photography purists will likely give the mode a miss, it’s definitely a game-changer for the price.
Add to all of the above the fact that Manual mode delivers plenty for purists to control – shutter speed, ISO, white balance and more – and the Honor 10 Lite manages to cater for everyone in some capacity.
As for the front camera, heavy beauty modes are optional, and should be turned off if you want to capture any amount of detail in your selfies. With those modes off, the camera performs respectably in all but low-light environments.
In addition, video is shot at up to Full HD resolution, and, like selfies, looks respectable until the lights go down. The lack of OIS can be felt here, though electronic stabilization works to ensure that the 10 Lite’s camera doesn’t let the phone down compared to other comparably priced handsets.
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