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Performance
The Honor 10 uses the same Kirin 970 processor that we first saw with the Mate 10 Pro. Alongside this is 4GB of RAM and 128GB internal storage
As expected, the synthetic benchmarks suggest performance of the Honor 10 is very similar to that of the Mate 10 Pro and the P20 Pro – after all, the processor is the same. The Honor does score marginally less in Geekbench 4, which is likely due to the fact that it has 4GB RAM compared to the 6GB found with the other two Huawei flagships, but the difference is not big.
In the real world, performance is generally fine – it is perhaps not quite as zippy as the P20 Pro, for instance, but most of the time the difference is small enough as to be irrelevant. I did notice the occasional slowdown, though, when opening a new app or folder – the phone would just hang for that extra second or two before getting back up to speed. This did not happen much, but you do notice it when the phone takes that bit longer to execute a task.
I would put this down to software at this point, as I don't see how it could be a hardware issue when I have had zero issues with either of the Mate 10 Pro or P20 Pro.
On the topic of slowdowns, the fingerprint scanner isn't the best out there. It works and will get you into your phone, but compared to almost every other fingerprint scanner on the market – including Honor's own 7X, which is even cheaper than the Honor 10 – it is noticeably slower.
I am not sure if this is directly related to the fact that the Honor 10 uses an under glass fingerprint scanner, or whether a software update is required to bring things up to speed. In any case, I have been using the face unlock feature almost exclusively for the past week and it is pretty quick and is also quite reliable, making it another good inclusion.
Software
Moving onto the software, the Honor 10 is running the latest version of Android – Oreo 8.1 – with the EMUI 8.1 skin on top.
This is exactly the same software as I have been using for the last two months with the P20 Pro, so I feel quite at home with it. I still think it could do with a little UI revamp to make the visuals a bit more modern, but there are some nifty features tucked away inside.
One of these is the ability to hide the notch by turning the pixels around it to black, while I also like being able to use the fingerprint scanner as the navigation buttons as this frees up the whole of the screen.
However, as I mentioned above, at the minute I have to say the software can occasionally feel a little sluggish when compared to the P20 Pro, and given the two phones use the same processor, I can't see how this is a hardware issue. If Honor can bring out an update ASAP to improve matters, that would be greatly appreciated.
