The Honor 10 Lite is a newer, cheaper, less powerful take on the Honor 10, but while it has a distinctly budget price (coming in at around £185 on Pay As You Go or from £14 per month on contract at the time of writing) this is far from a basic phone. In fact, it actually beats the Honor 10 in some ways and has highlights such as a big, sharp screen, a dual-lens camera and lots of storage. Read on to find out the detail in Honor 10 Lite Review with Toptechslife!
Contents
Design
- Plastic back and sides
- Glass front with pre-fitted screen protector
- Protective case in the box
The Honor 10 Lite is a great-looking mid-range smartphone. In the box you get a clear case to keep your phone protected, and there’s a screen protector pre-fitted as well, to stave off superficial screen damage.
At 8mm thick and 162g, the 10 Lite is indeed light, owing largely to its plastic body. The sides sport a chrome effect and feel really nice in the hand – smooth, without being too slippery.
As for the back, it looks like glass, and feels like it too, even sporting an ergonomic, premium glass-like curve. Be warned though: it’s plastic – and plastic scratches much more easily than glass, so if you’re picking up an Honor 10 Lite, get the case on before you slip it in your pocket.
There are plenty of color options here: Sky Blue, Midnight Black and Sapphire Blue, with some options sporting a gradient finish, as introduced on the Huawei P20 Pro and carried over to the Mate 20.
The rear fingerprint scanner is in the middle of the phone and easy to hit, with the ridged edges easily identified when extending a digit.
There are two cameras on the rear – again, not too bad for the price – and they’re slightly raised from the body. While camera bumps aren’t great, when you put the included case on the 10 Lite both case and lenses are relatively flush, so the bump becomes unnoticeable.
Power
The Honor 10 Lite has an octa-core Kirin 710 chipset, with four cores running at 2.2GHz and four going at 1.7GHz. It’s a reasonably speedy mid-range chipset that will struggle with some demanding games but should prove zippy for most general tasks, especially as it’s coupled with 3GB of RAM.
And on the subject of games, it does at least have a GPU Turbo mode, which boosts its gaming performance in compatible titles.
Power is another area where the standard Honor 10 has the Lite model beat, as that phone has a high-end chipset and more RAM, but for the money this is still a very solid setup.
Camera
You get two lenses on the back of the Honor 10 Lite, as there’s both a 13MP f/1.8 main lens and a 2MP depth sensor. The camera can also use AI to recognise and adjust settings for 22 different scenes, so you can just point and shoot and generally get good results. In fact, pictures look good even at night, thanks to an ‘AIS Super Night Shoot’ mode.
If there’s a criticism its that colours aren’t always totally natural, especially when using the AI modes, but that aside this is a very strong showing for the money.
The front-facing camera is good too, as this is a 24MP one, so you can take detailed, high-resolution selfies. It also includes a portrait mode allowing you to adjust the lighting in a shot, and it has a bunch of beauty tools. As usual less is more with these tools, but it’s nice to have them as an option.
Battery, Fingerprint, Sound and more
Coming to the battery performance, the Honor 10 Lite is backed by a 3400mAh battery, which easily lasted almost a day under normal usage. When you stretch the performance of the device, you still get more than half a day of usage. However, the downside here is the lack of fast charging.
The phone takes almost 2 hours to be charged fully and a half an hour of charge gave approx. 30 to 33 per cent of the battery. The fingerprint sensor is quite fast in our testing and so was the facial recognition. The speakers are loud and produce good sound quality and the earpiece volume is decent.
