Honor 10 Lite Initial Impression: A Great Budget Smartphone

We already reviewed the Honor flagship, Honor 10 which was impressive for a handset with a price of around Rs. 31,700. With the 2017’s flagship processor, Kirin 970 SoC, and a high RAM and internal storage as well as a high-quality camera.

The smartphone offers lots of value for a device in the mid-range segment, but the Huawei’s sub-brand, Honor, is reportedly planning to unveil another variant for those who have a lower budget, the Honor 10 Lite. The Lite model is expected to release in the Indian market on 26 December.

We got the chance to hold the Honor 10 lite on hands for a little while, and these are our initial impressions of the phone.

Honor 10 Lite: Design

The Honor 10 Lite surely has a stunning design. While the phone has a standard silver and black colour options that shimmer in the Aurora pattern of Honor, it also comes in a sky blue variant which can transition from a light blue at its bottom to silver at the top which looks pretty good. However, it is prone to dust and fingerprint when we experienced it.

It has a rear glass finish which looks and feels pretty premium, but it comes with relatively cheap aluminum sides. It was also fairly light to hold on hands with 162 grams in weight.

Honor 10 Lite: Specifications, Display, and Camera

The Honor 10 Lite features a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and a dual rear camera setup with a main 13MP f1.8 sensor and a secondary 2MP f2.4 depth sensor.

The Honor handset sports a 6.21-inch TFT LCD panel with a 2,340 x 1,080 pixels resolution, a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and a water-drop notch.

The water-drop notch accommodates a 24MP f2.0 front-facing camera which can recognise up to 8 different selfie scenarios and then react appropriately, adding more things like skin smoothing and colour adjustments. It also has many different studio lighting modes.

Its display is not really disappointing, but it still shows that the phone is undoubtedly not at the flagship level. It has a prominent difference in the quality between the Honor 10 and Honor 10 Lite. The Lite model’s display feels very matte which could be sharper though its colours are quite punchy and deep.

The Micro-USB port is another clear indication that the Honor 10 Lite is a budget phone. There are an audio jack and one speaker on the bottom of the phone and both sides of the USB port.

Specifications are yet another thing making it a budget phone. The Lite model comes with a Kirin 710 SoC along with 3GB RAM/64GB storage. Obviously, the Kirin 710 is nowhere near the level of the flagship SoC, Kirin 980 processor, though its octa-core SoC is still enough for daily tasks. Though we still have to thoroughly review the handset before making any conclusion. The phone’s storage is also expandable up to 512GB.

The Honor handset runs the Android 9 Pie-based EMUI 9.1 which is a somewhat controversial UI as the majority of users either hate it or love it.

The current price of the handset in the United Arab Emirate is 799 dirham (around Rs. 15,200), which is only a half of the Honor 10’s price, so it would be a good choice for Honor fans with a low budget.