Huawei’s Honor 10 flagship smartphone is finally here

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At a packed event in London, Chinese device maker Huawei unveiled their next flagship for their Honor brand, the Honor 10. In keeping with recent trends, this device was pitched with the quality of the camera being the main selling point.

We’ve known most of the details on the Honor 10 already, since it launched in China last month, so any differences will be regional as it goes on sale around the world.

The Honor 10 sticks to the usual yearly release window, given that the well-received Honor 9 was launched almost a year ago. Disappointingly, it won’t be coming to the USA for a while, if at all. A Huawei spokesperson has stated that the company will be announcing other new devices for the USA market at a later date this year.

Honor is pitching the Honor 10 with the tagline: “Beauty in AI.” Just like the Huawei P20 that launched last month, the AI camera is coming to the Honor range. It promises to bring beautiful photographs powered by artificial intelligence.

A 24MP + 16MP dual-lens camera serves the AI Camera on the back that Huawei claim can recognize a vast number of scenarios over 22 categories in real time. We’ve seen this on phones like the Pixel XL’s portrait mode, where the AI is used to pick out the subject from the photo and blur the background. Huawei has expanded on this, and we’re interested to see how well it works in practice. It won’t replace your DSLR, but perhaps it will fool the casual viewer.

There’s also a 24MP front camera that will be roped into selfie-duty, that sports 3D face recognition and can optimize facial details to improve clarity. Zit hiding in real time?

The rest of the device has a stylish glass body, 3400mAh camera, 4GB of RAM and a 5.84-inch screen. It will come in two storage variants of 64 and 128GB. No expandable storage options, and yes, the ‘notch’ that’s trending is here also. Maybe you can forgive the notch since there’s still a headphone jack.

The UK pricing for the Honor 10 will be £399.99 (roughly equivalent to $540 or €455), making it more affordable than most flagships from other brands.

The Honor 10 will be available in four colors — blue, green, black, and grey — and goes on sale SIM-free online from today (unless you’re in the US).

What do you think about all of the souped-up Honor 10 features? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments. 

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.