The sub-20K smartphone category has witnessed a lot of innovations in terms of design and camera in the last few years. Some of the phones in this category focus on design, while others have their eyes set on offering a better camera experience and yet there are others that try to strike a balance between the two. The latest entrant into this rapidly developing segment is the Honor 10 Lite. With a dewdrop notch, gradient colour finish and 3D curved edge design, the Honor 10 Lite has undergone a complete makeover in terms of design. But, what about the performance? Well, powered by the Kirin 710 chipset, the Honor 10 Lite performs just as well as any other flagship phone, if not better. So, let’s take a closer look at the various aspects of the smartphone.
Gradient Design
The front of the device features a dewdrop notch, and it looks exactly as it sounds – a tiny droplet of water hanging at the top of the screen. This means more screen for your viewing pleasure as compared to other big-notch devices.
According to Honor, the smartphone uses a combination of eight layers of shimmering material to create a striking gradient effect, which is more visible at the back and when light falls on it at a certain angle, it reflects a beautiful linear pattern. The Honor 10 Lite comes in three gradient colours – sky blue, sapphire blue and midnight black.
Thanks to the chip-on-film screen technology, The Honor 10 Lite boasts a significantly slimmer bottom bezel of 4.7mm as compared to its predecessor Honor 10. The dual-SIM (nano) Honor 10 Lite runs EMUI 9.0 on top of Android 9.0 Pie and features a 6.21-inch full-HD+ (1080x2340 pixels) display with a pixel density of 415ppi. The screen-to-body ratio is at 91 per cent.
Display
The full-HD+ display is good and offers plenty of customisation options, including colour mode and temperature controls. While the Normal mode offers warm colours, the Vivid mode offers bright and deep colours. There is also a colour temperature dial in the display settings that you can adjust as per your liking. While the display is good enough for most scenarios, the screen is not HDR compliant, which means the Honor 10 Lite is not capable of making those parts of an image bright that are supposed to be bright without affecting darker colours.
In the same price segment, the Nokia 7.1 supports HDR10, which means the smartphone can produce a wider colour gamut as compared to the Honor 10 Lite while viewing HDR-supported content on apps like Netflix and YouTube.
The Honor 10 Lite also offers a number of themes and wallpapers along with the option to customise icons, texts and screen layout to suit your taste.
Performance
The HiSilicon Kirin 710 SoC clubbed with 6GB of RAM offers seamless performance when using one or two apps. But juggling between six to seven apps can make the smartphone stutters slightly and the delay in aligning an app to the screen is apparent, although, I must add, navigating through them is smooth.
The GPU Turbo 2.0 technology in the smartphone offers a frame rate of 60fps. And if we go by Honor’s claim, then the Honor 10 Lite offers reduced shakes during gaming. However, and sadly, that’s not true for all games. Take PUBG for instance, you can run the game, no doubt, but on medium graphics setting best, and that too is not without performance delays.
During my test, the on-screen navigation didn’t work as accurately as it should’ve while shooting other players three out of five times.
In terms of security, the smartphone offers fingerprint and face unlock – both of which are fast and capable of unlocking the device instantly. The Honor 10 Lite’s operating system offers ‘Password Vault’, which acts as a password manager to streamline all user IDs, passwords and online credentials for websites and apps into one secure space only you can access. There’s also a Live Transcribe app that captures speech from the phone’s microphone and displays it as text on the screen in real time, but you can’t save them. And while Google processes those conversations accurately most of the time, it never stores them.
The 3,400mAh battery easily lasts a full day of typical use without being completely drained. The company has also added Power Saving and Ultra Power Saving modes to give you more control over the battery use.
The Honor 10 Lite packs a 24MP AI selfie camera with a wide f/2.0 aperture and can recognise over 200 scenarios across eight categories, including sky, greenery, flowers, beach, stage performance, night, indoor, snow and more. The selfies captured by the front camera are good but has a hint of beautification on almost every captured image. This means instead of capturing natural skin tone, images appear slightly brighter, if you have the beauty algorithm turned on, that is. The phone offers 10 levels of beautification, and if you set it to one, the camera will try to process the image as naturally as it can. For a more balanced image, we recommend using the Honor 10 Lite on level 5.
The company has also upgraded the beauty algorithm and is now adjustable based on gender, skin tone and age. Further, the beautification edit suite features include skin smoothing, skin tone adjustment, acne cover-up, face slimming, highlights and shadows, oily skin fixing, eye enlargement and brightening, eye bag removal and teeth whitening.
With studio-quality editing suite of lighting options, the Honor 10 Lite allows users to make their own portrait art from a range of scenario-specific options, including soft lighting, butterfly lighting, split lighting, stage lighting and classic lighting.
The 13MP rear camera produces neat images in bright daylight. Non-portrait mode photos look good and are rich in colours. While clicking with the portrait mode on, the camera recognises the subject, but the artistic blur produced is not clean and refined at the edges.
Conclusion
At Rs 17,999, the Honor 10 Lite offers a refreshing gradient colour design, is more than capable of running your everyday tasks efficiently and can shoot decent images.
Price Rs 17,999
Pros
Design, lightweight
Cons
At times, images look overly processed
