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Battery life
- Average battery life that lasts around a day
- Fast-charging features are included, but no wireless charging
Honor has increased the battery size on the Honor 10 over the Honor 9, from 3,200mAh to 3,400mAh. While that may look like an improvement, however, it’s worth noting that the screen is bigger here, so there are more pixels to power.
That said, as with the Honor 9, we’ve found the phone will generally last a full day on a single charge. We used the device for two weeks, and in that time we found a couple of occasions when it didn’t last the full day.
Each occasion was with extensive usage though. In those situations, we’d prefer the phone to last a little longer; we'd like to tell you that we didn’t get the stage where the phone died around 10PM, but that did happen once or twice.
We ran our normal battery test on the Honor 10 where we play a Full HD video at full brightness for 90 minutes, and the phone had 84% battery left at the end of it. That's an OK score, but isn't fantastic.
It's a bit of an improvement over the Honor 9, which came out with 83% battery left over so that's likely down to the optimization improvements in the new chipset.
The Honor 10 does come with fast-charging though, and we found this could fully charge the phone in under two hours.
This is particularly useful if you need to just pump up your phone with a few hours of charge in half an hour or so.
There’s no wireless charging on the Honor 10, but that’s an extra feature we wouldn’t always expect to see on this kind of cheaper flagship device. You don't even get that on the Huawei P20, but it is something we've seen on the iPhone 8 and iPhone X.
Camera
- Dual sensor rear camera with 24MP and 16MP sensors
- Comes with 22 automatic camera modes for different scenarios
Like previous Huawei and Honor phones, the Honor 10 comes with a dual rear camera. One sensor is a 24MP monochrome shooter while the other is a 16MP color one.
When you take a photo on the rear camera in auto mode, the camera will take the same shot with both sensors, and combine the images for a photo with more detail than you’d get from a single lens.
The quality here is great, and while the Honor 10’s camera may not have as many features as the camera on the Huawei P20 it still does a great job in auto mode.
Honor’s processing tech will use artificial intelligence to automatically improve the shots you’ve taken. That means the camera software will use algorithms to brighten areas of a shot, or change the focus, to create what it believes will be the best result.
Honor says the phone can identify 22 different scenes, including greenery or pets, so the phone will detect what you’re shooting and work out how to improve the shot. Below you can see an example of a greenery shot with AI turned on and then off.
This feature worked well in our testing, and usefully you can press a button and see what the photo looks like without the AI enhancements. If the phone hasn’t enhanced the photo to your liking, you can then revert to the original.
Below you'll see a photo taken with AI turned off, and then one with AI turned on in dog mode.
There are also lots of pro mode features, so if you want to more control over the settings for the best results with different subjects you can deep-dive and play around with these.
Our experience with shooting video on the Honor 10 has been limited so far, but the footage we have captured looks good – it’s smooth, and both the image quality and audio quality are high.
On the front of the phone there's a powerful 24MP selfie camera capable of taking high-quality shots that are more than good enough for social media use.
One new feature of the portrait mode is that you can set the lighting effect for your selfies. This is something you can also do with the rear camera, but it’s particularly useful for selfies. There are five different options: soft lighting, butterfly lighting, split lighting, stage lighting and classic lighting.
The final two modes will focus just on your face. The classic lighting will give you a black and white filter, while the stage lighting is a dramatic, brighter effect that cuts out the background and focuses just on your face.
It works in a similar way to stage light and stage light mono on the iPhone X.
Selfies without these lighting modes also look good, but in poor lighting the first two modes in particular will help you capture a better-quality selfie, while the final two effects look to be pretty much unique to the Honor 10.
The other useful element is that you can fiddle with the lighting after you’ve taken the photo.
This is all done through the Portrait mode within the camera app, which also offers a bokeh effect, allowing you to automatically blur the background behind your shots, like on the rear camera.
It also includes a beauty effect with ten different levels, so you can smooth out imperfections on your skin.
Camera samples
