Honor 10 Lite Review: The UI needs a little more attention

Honor recently launched the Honor 10 Lite smartphone in India. The smartphone is here to compete against the likes of smartphones like - Asus ZenFone Max Pro M2 and Realme 3. Honor 10 Lite looks more impressive than most of the smartphones in this price range. However, is the performance as impressive as its looks? Find out in our in-depth review of the smartphone below.

Honor 10 Lite Review: Specifications

Honor 10 Lite sports a 6.21-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 2340x1080 pixels. The device is powered by the Kirin 710 processor coupled with a Mali-G51 MP4 GPU. The dual-SIM handset comes with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage, which is further expandable using a microSD card. All of this is backed by a 3,400mAh battery.

Price: Rs. 17,999

Honor 10 Lite Review: Design

Honor 10 Lite comes with a gradient back design making it one of the better-looking smartphones in this price range. While the back looks like glass, it is actually plastic and extremely prone to scratches. Thankfully, Honor bundles a soft silicone case inside the box.

Honor 10 Lite sports a full HD+ display on the front with a waterdrop style notch, which houses the selfie camera. It also has a slim chin that consists of the notification LED. It is also worth noting that the phone is very light-weight.

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The right side has the volume rockers and the power button, the left side is left clean. The bottom is congested with the micro-USB port, a speaker grille, microphone and a 3.5mm jack. Up top, there is a secondary noise-cancelling microphone alongside a hybrid SIM card tray, which accepts two nano-SIM cards or one SIM card and one microSD card.

Honor 10 Lite Review: Display

Honor 10 Lite features a 6.21-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 2340x1080 pixels. There is a waterdrop style notch up top, which has become a trend even in budget smartphones. The display itself is bright enough for indoor use case scenarios. However, using the phone outdoors under direct sunlight even at full brightness might not give you the best results. Honor does give its users with a few extra settings for the display that can help them configure it to their liking.

Honor 10 Lite Review: Software & UI

Honor 10 Lite runs EMUI 9.0.1 based on Google's Android 9.0 Pie operating system. The company's custom skin, EMUI, comes with great optimisations for battery. The UI now comes with an app drawer making it much easier to use. However, the heavy skin does result in minor lags and hiccups. Honor ships the device with some bloatware, which includes Netflix, Camera 360, Facebook and more.

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Honor 10 Lite Review: Performance

Honor 10 Lite comes with the company's in-house Kirin 710 chipset, which is a significant upgrade over the Kirin 659 we saw on phones like Honor 9N and Honor 9 Lite. During the review period, we played games like Asphalt 9: Legends and PUBG Mobile, both of which ran without any problems. There was no lag but we did notice frame drops at high settings.

The device managed to get a respectable score of 124921 on AnTuTu. On GeekBench 4, the Honor 10 Lite secure 1516 on single-core and 5257 on multi-core benchmarks.

Honor 10 Lite Review: Camera

Honor 10 Lite comes with a dual-camera setup on the back consisting of a 13-megapixel primary and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. Up front, there is a 24-megapixel selfie shooter that sits inside the waterdrop style notch. While the numbers are impressive on the sensor side, the image processing and software play a major role here.

The smartphone is able to quickly focus on objects as well as people. With the help of AI mode, the phone detects anything it is pointed at. However, with AI mode enabled, the images come out to be a bit more saturated than they are supposed to be. There is also a portrait mode and it works as you would expect from a budget smartphone.

As for the selfies, the software comes with beauty mode enabled by default, which smoothens the skin tone. Turning the feature off brings out much better and sharper images.

Honor 10 Lite Review: Battery

Although 3,400mAh seems quite less considering phones in a similar price segment come with 4,000 or even 5,000mAh batteries, it does perform decently. Honor 10 Lite runs on EMUI, which has some heavy optimisations for better battery performance.

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During our testing, the Honor 10 Lite was easily able to last through a working day with heavy usage. However, due to such battery optimisations, you might miss out on some important notifications like I did.

Honor 10 Lite Review: Verdict

Honor 10 Lite, at the time of launch, might have been a good option in the budget smartphone category. However, at the time of writing this review, there are much better smartphones available in the market like the Realme 3, Redmi Note 7 and the Redmi Note 7 Pro, which offer much better value on paper.

This does not mean that Honor 10 Lite is a bad phone at all. It does shine where it is meant to. The smartphone comes with a lightweight design making it a great option for those looking for a secondary device. The cameras are also quite good and even the performance is decent. If Honor would have polished the software a little bit and kept the pricing a little more aggressive, this would have been a more promising smartphone.