The year is already drawing to an end, but Honor is showing no signs of slowing down in its smartphone production. The Honor 10 Lite is finally coming to the country, but only in January next year. While it’s technically less than a month away, Honor was kind enough to let me play with the phone ahead of time.
For a start, the Honor 10 Lite is very clearly lighter than most of the smartphones I’ve used or handled. By comparison, the Honor 8X that I reviewed earlier last month feels like a brick in my pocket. It’s nice that the phone doesn’t weigh my pants down, but at the same time, I’m kind of used to using a phone with a bit of heft.
In terms of design, the Honor 10 Lite sports a simple yet sleek design. The front display is nothing out of the ordinary, with a gradient curving around all the edges. The display’s chin is also relatively thin, thus giving it the looks of an edge-to-edge and near bezel-less display.
Still on the subject of the display; yes, the 6.21-inch Full HD+ display of the Honor 10 Lite does have a notch, but mercifully, it’s only a teardrop-size notch with the 24MP front-facing camera situated within it. Compared to other notches, I like this notch design just because it obstructs less of the notifications. Of course, it goes without saying that you can still hide via the on-board software.
Regarding its hardware, I should point out that while the Honor 10 Lite will reportedly come with up to 6GB RAM and 128GB of expandable storage, the model I have in my hand only possesses 3GB RAM and just 32GB of expandable storage. As per an earlier report, this could be one of the variants that Honor will be bringing into the country, though the brand has yet to confirm this.
One thing that has to be said about the Honor 10 Lite; the phone is a real fingerprint and dust magnet. No less than a couple of minutes of holding it, I can already see all the imprints I made on the back of it. It’s even worse when the dust literally begins to settle on the phone. It’s even more apparent with the gradient blue colour scheme of my phone.
Moving on, the phone’s dual 13MP + 2MP main camera doesn’t really have much to shout about, and performs just about as one would expect for a mid-range camera. Daytime photography is practically a no-brainer. With or without the assistance of the phone’s AI camera.
However, the Honor 10 Lite’s photography story isn’t quite the same in low-light environments. As you can see from the sample images below, colours seem ready to pop out, and on top of that, the saturation levels are very apparent. And mind you, this was with the AI Camera enabled.
Look past the low-light drawbacks though, and you’ll find that the on-board camera software is snappy. In my brief experience with the Honor 10 Lite, I rarely encountered any shutter lag while taking photos. On a side note, this fluidity also extended towards the phone’s UI performance.
At this point, the only thing that remains to be announced about the Honor 10 Lite is a local pricing. However, that will all change come 8 January next year, which really isn’t that far away. In any case, we’re still not done testing the phone, so you can expect a full review of the phone in the near future.
