Honor Note 10 Unboxing & Hands-On Review

 Higuys Chris here so if you follow me and the channel you'd know that I'd like larger phones and I decided that yes I have to check this one out there's been a lot of requests for it I've just finished reviewing Xiaomi's Mi Max three for the price is a fantastic last mobile phone it's got a six point nine

inch screen this one IPS and what w have with the honor note in here is a six point nine five inch screen so slightly larger the resolution is twenty

to twenty by ten eighty it's an AMOLE screen as well that does support HDR, HDR10 spec so it should look very very good this display and the build of it is

I think it's glass or they have on th rear they've got twin cameras on the back of it so one 16 megapixels the other 24 both with an F 1.8 aperture so

that's relatively bright lens there and it should perform well in low-light hopefully a lot better than the likes of the Mi Max 3 and of course it is a more

expensive mobile phone here so you do expect it to perform a Nereus like that a lot better so it has highways custom chip in here which is the keren 970 a five thousand milliamp hour battery so it's slightly smaller than the Xiaomi me max three and there is one disappointing thing to note with this that the boot loaders locked we expected this with far away and the other thing of course is there's no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which is sad to see on such a large mobile phone okay so this is going to be a long video that's going to cover a lot of stuff in detail there's some time codes here so

feel free to skip ahead so you see the box very simple plain-looking here just says it's the honor Note 10 with the little AI marketing there ok so just get

this out of the wrapper so for those that are going to ask me how did you get hold of it so fast very simple I bought this from China and I got express

delivery DHL so there's the phone there just take it out for a second and we'll take a look at what else we get in the box so you can see here we do have a

sentry tool now the SIM tray it doe actually support two sims or one sim and a micro SD card so you have to give up one of the sons if you

want to use micro SD card with this but good to see they do have support so this I think has a case in it my looks of it yeah ok there's some warranty things whatnot that's all in Chinese as to be expected so we'll take a look at this case as you can see it's a trance gray TPU style and it's better than

having nothing good to see manufacturers a lot of manufacturers in fact including cases now in the box and then right here in this little packet we have sadly the adapter here so type C - 3.5 millimeter such a shame they did not include this this is one of the real kind of deal breakers almost for me because I love to use 3.5 millimeter headphone that I have and just plug them straight in without using silly adapters so here we have the top C cable obviously and then the charger right here and it is huawei's supercharged specs so the maximum output is 5 volts 4.5 amps so you see it just comes in this little slip here so let's get it out of that and take a look at the phone so at the bottom we have honor branding there on the chin and it does come with a pre applied screen protector so along the bottom you will find some grills here now they've got a loudspeaker one of two right here and then the microphone the type C port and you can see those two gray antenna lines the whole bottom of the phone is rounded here and it does feel really nice any hand we've got 2.5 D glass the resume doubt of glass we have a fingerprint read and you can see the marketing branding there ai camera the dual tone LED flash and then those two cameras so once 24 megapixels the other 16 one of them is just black and white and both of them have an F 1.8 aperture now neither of these cameras have any optical image stabilization so just like the Huawei P 20 Pro which is a little bit unfortunate but it does have electronic image stabilization at 1080p at least you see here the volume buttons made out of metal and they do feel really good they do not rattle around either and then down the bottom of the right hand side you'll find this button which is dedicated to the CPU turbo and GPO turbo modes which is basically just marketing it's all marketing hype here but this button does have a secondary purpose and that is the shutter button when you're in the stock camera app on the top left hand side you'll find these sim tray so to nano Sims or a micro SD card and nano SIM now note that this does have meal reinforcing around it but it doesn't have a Gasquet they're to keep out any water or dust and along the top the earpiece then that 13 megapixel camera with an F 2.0 aperture and thankfully they didn't do anything silly like put a you notch display on this and taking a look at it side-by-side with the Xiaomi me max 3 they are almost identical the dimensions of these two so we have more of a rock to this one when you let on a table which I have now and not so much here with the honor note because the cameras don't protrude as much and I will measure it now and weigh it also just after this so the bottom notch you can see here is slightly smaller on the honor note 10 the top notch as well slightly smaller and really the height difference marginally higher taller the honor note 10 then the me max 3 only by about 2 millimeters or so and as it expect the more expensive on a note 10 feels much better in hand it feels like a premium flagship the me max well it feels more like a read me phone because it's got the middle unibody housing on it and it does have that lip around the edges which you don't get on the honor note 10 this one is more rounded and overall just has a much higher quality feel to it now looking at the thickness of it it's approximately 8 millimeters that's without the cameras and when the camera is there then that brings it up to 8.5 so not bad at all in terms of thickness and just checking the weight of it it does feel quite heavy yes it is so two hundred and thirty five grams making this a large relatively heavy phone and the me max story of course is a little bit lighter because it doesn't have the glass on the red that comes in at 222 grams all right so powering this arm for the first time you get a haptic feedback

vibration and you can see now the bezels of this so the side bezels to me look  little bit larger than the press images they tend to do that don't they they

photoshopped them to be a little slimmer than they really are so this ROM isn't your typical Chinese roms from the likes of the show-me devices our review you've just got English in Chinese now you've got every single language you can think of is in here now part of the setup we do have the following

unlocking options that you get normally with most Android 8.1 devices now as you get faced unlocking and then fingerprint ID as well so I will just actually test that out now and set that up and also the face unlocking now I've got the camera and the tripod in the way so you really don't know how this is going to work out now it's gonna be very difficult and have to do this off camera alright so we'll test out the face unlocking I managed to get it to scan my

face properly without the camera in the way so if I tap it now you can see it's looking for my face its vibrated that it hasn't found me and so it's gonna be pretty hard for me to do with the camera right here try that again recognizing face okay it's recognized me but the silly thing is it won't go straight and unlock I still have to swipe to unlock to get into the UI which is to me a bit silly there must be a seating I think there is and then as the reason why I prefer to use the fingerprint unlocking so the fingerprint reader on the back this is always on and you simply just place your finger there and look how

quick that is it's almost instantaneous it works really quick and flawlessly so far all right so this screen is looking and really good so far as you'd expect for a 6.95 AMOLED panel not bad at all but just take a look at all of this below where crap we have on here now of course I did expect there's been a Chinese phone they just love to cram just so much junk on here look at it all and they've even got this top apps which is full with a whole bunch of

other rubbish in there too that I'm gonna have to uninstall checking the free space now we've got 52 gigabytes free just over the Android security

patch level is the first of July 2018 considering now we're in August this is not bad at all and you can see that it's also running that Kieran 970 chipset

from Huawei this is my first time with a keren 970 so I did want to have a little detailed look at it here so it's an octa-core and the GPU is the Mele g72 and you can see we've got four arm cortex a7 t3 s and then we've got four i'm cortex a53 set a lower clock right there and I've just checked for system updates there is nothing so it is on the latest version of EMU eye which is point two so the phone doesn't have fullscreen gestures which to me is a

little disappointing they really need to put that in there just get a little bit more modern other phones are switching to jesters so you've got single key

navigation mode there you've got the three key navigation which I've got at the moment and then navigation dock which is basically just like a little

button there that you can use to  navigate I would have liked to have seen capacitive menu keys here Hardware ones down the bottom so you could touch those

because there's actually room and that bottom bezel for a bit manufacturers are switching away from that and just going with on-screen buttons or gestures now getting placed or on the huawei phones is quite easy so you just need to go to what's called the app gallery and then search Google you'll find Google Play Store and then install it so now taking a look at the screen but first I wantedto show you that the white balance you can adjust this and the color

temperature so your own personal preference here good to see they hav this setting here all manufacturers should include this but surprisingly

some don't actually so you can tweak that white balance and tweak the colors so the gamma comes out to be two points

three and the closest to two point two is really best but this isn't far off so this is quite good viewing angles as expected for an AMOLED panel they are

really good some of the best that yo will see on a mobile phone and now I'm quickly looking at the display side by side with the me max 3 so the me max

trees got the IPS panel and really oka the difference between the two you definitely notice that the panel on the honor Note 10 is superior when it comes

to color reproductions it just seems t be a little bit more accurate there but all in all really there's not a massive difference and it's definitely not worth that extra price tag when you look at both of these devices so we have to factor in the whole thing what are the cameras like on this phone but overall it is a really good-looking screen more accurate definitely more accurate than the me max threes display blacks of course is where the screen looks really good because they are a deep black and I'm not noticing too much of a grayness when you move it of course I do have the screen protector on I'm gonna leave iton there because I don't want to scratch the screen up maximum brightness is also really good I just measured 690 lux

that's a huge step up that's about 220 or so Lux more than the ciao Mimi max 3 so I've just run antutu and this is a really good score 209,000 very quick and that isn't in that cpu turbo boost mode either so it turns out for storage they are using ufs 2.1 and look at these speed this is crazy fast

the fastest I have seen actually on a mobile phone yet with the sequential reads very good random reads and writes and also the sequential writes is also

up there 204 now I just assumed that qua way would have gone with MMC 5.1 speed but I'm glad to see there heaven this is really flagship storage speeds also

checking out the Widevine editors level 1 and this is great so Netflix you can install it from Google Play Store and you can run it in HD you're not limited

just to STS so she'll me needs to take note here they are still running with only version 3 and no surprises here with treble check so it does not support

treble even though it does have Android 8.1 this is a shame camera API to check here so hit as limited support so this means you're not going to get full

features using other apps and that will connect up and use the camera API - from Google so one thing I like about this

phone as it has dual loudspeakers on the top and then on the bottom as well but the thing I don't like is we're missing a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack but

anyway let's test out those loudspeakers and I can say now they do sound much better than the me max threes and overall not bad loudspeakers at all

wireless speeds now they're not the fastest I have seen I've seen in the 400s from the Snapdragon 805 but this is still very good the kind of throughput

we can get here up to around 780 megabits per second 4G speeds well I'm with orange here at the moment you can see and they're not

wonderful but it's getting what every other single mobile phone out there is getting our call quality seems also very good and I notice the signal strength

fine as well no problems with that either Wireless range also seems very good just like GPS it saw 20 satellites it locked onto 20 satellites the lock was really quick and the accuracy hovers around 4 to 5 meters which is perfectly fine so just looking now at the phone's performance in general just real world

use I've noticed it is very quick and snappy especially with a really fast storage and I haven't noticed any problems with the task manager so it's

not automatically killing off any applications too soon I feel it it seems to be fine but swapping between your apps going back home loading things and

this is all really really quick I mean this feels every bit a flagship phone and I haven't seen really any start of what I have noticed a couple of times is

just what I've gone like this swapping for side to side I've seen a tiny tiny little bit of animation stutter now one annoying thing of course this is

a Chinese phone and as expected really are you gonna see this okay so you can see a little bit of Chinese text here now we've got that AI button on the side

I don't really know what it does it just really clocks up the governor doesn't it for the CPU and the GPU clocks holds them at maximum speed I think so it's

gonna chew through the battery and when you tap it so you turn it on I don't actually know there's no way to see where it's on or off it gives you all

this thing right here in Chinese which I don't read but what I think it's saying is probably that that what it's doing or it's gonna consume more battery life yada-yada yeah and yet it's kind of annoying that that is there so you're gonna see this Chinese popping up her and there now we do have you see it

again but a Chinese right there so it's telling me some new app things so that'snalways going to be there we do have NFC on here as well which is good to see so you can buy a dock for this and running like Samsung's next really so can have like a desktop but I tested it out if you don't have that specific

hardware for it which I don't have on hand I've tried my HDMI adapters I've also tried my type C hubs and everything I cannot get any HDMI signal out of this which is a little bit unfortunate I didn't expect it to work I'm OTG does work by the way so we'll do that one game here which is a very popular one here this is pub G now it auto detects these settings as high so high graphics high frame rate as you can see here but you can adjust this to HDR

and ultra if you want and that's what I'm gonna test out now so you can see where the map framerate is really good as expected on Ultra and with this

chipset they keren 970 just jump out of the plane so I have turned on that well at least I think it's on the GPU turbo you tap it and it doesn't actually give you any signs it's on or I'm turning it off which was rather silly or maybe that's what it was telling me in Chinese that I didn't actually understand there so you can see here there's a little bit of stutter just then and that seems to happen on every single device just loading in the textures and things so I've been playing for a few minutes now and the framerate is really good the graphics look good and because we've got the large immersive screen it's just a real joy to play this game here and the speakers also they add quite a bit tobecause they've got a bit of bass to them they sound nice and I almost

crashed just then yes very playable I'll just get off the motorbike here and I'll zoom in with the scope to show you that that that's very smooth and there is no lag with that either you can see it's a really good performance here for demanding games like pop G so Huawei has marketed a lot about the cooling on this it's got some sort of copper heat transfer pipe on there to lower temperatures 10 degrees I don't know what that's compared to though 10 degrees less than what so the front of its getting up to 35 degrees and I've noticed that the rear so around this part he just below the fingerprint reader here it is actually getting quite warm to the touch that is actually it's cool in the front of it so that's about 32 degrees though so it's gonna get war but it looks

like at this point thermals are definitely under control over in the camera app now so we're not going to go through everything because it's just

gonna be very lengthy this is alread long enough this video so we have a IMO that says on by default now to me these AI boosting photography modes they're

all just a gimmick because all they do is just bolster up the saturation the colors boost them and the brightnesssometimes so I don't particularly

actually like that but maybe some peopl do like this kind of feature there that's got that obviously we have the portrait mode using the dual cameras on

the rear a night mode there as well an you can shoot with the front-facing camera up to 720p and you can also shoot with the rear camera 4k but no optical

image stabilization or electronic image stabilization in 4k which is a little disappointing so just like the the p20 pro there you can see if we go into the

pro mode which I wanted to show you here we've got ISO shutter exposure and in the focus control and white balance we can also shoot in RAW format which is

good to see and then the resolution up to 24 megapixels here the default is the 16 and all the other settings here you can see there are pretty straightforward there so sample now probably better with noise because it is quite windy at the moment only 720p max with the front

camera which is slightly disappointing really because a lot of other manufacturers are offering at least 1080p and on budget phones and some even

up to 4k like the vivo phone now this is a sample shot with the rear cameras and it's 4k but you'll see it's a little shaky because there is no electronic or optical image stabilization which I feel is a bit of an error there they really should have put optical image stabilization at least with the sensor

you can shoot up to 10 minutes max the focus is face detection autofocus and you can see it tends to do an okay job it's not quite as good as you you

can see there as that dual pixel face detection example on the Samsung Galaxy s8 s9 and even the Xiaomi me max 3 has that now if you drop the resolution down to 1080p then you do have electronic image stabilization which you can see does an excellent job this is super smooth and steady it almost looks like I

am using a gamble but I'm not definitely not this is a shame it's not working in 4k all right so to quickly recap here we're looking at a phone that of course has a super large screen it's not gonna be if for everyone it's quite heavy at 200 in what was at 235 grams and when you're

using it yeah you're holding up basically a seven-inch tablet to your ear now we have an AMOLED screen so it comes out a much better than the me max three that I have the screen is definitely a lot better the build quality is better the cameras better as well there and this is to be expected of

course because there's a massive difference in the prices as a premium mid-range err that's more of a budget device so this is selling for a nothing's for 250 us versus 400 plus 409 450 it is a big difference there so no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack that's a real shame I feel on such a large tablet

it should definitely have that now the face unlocking I'll just do it again it works really well but it's kind of silly that you have to slide to unlock and it just doesn't go straight into the UI like other phones do their fingerprint reader works really great cameras they do look really promising really good

actually they'd step up I feel yeah better than the me max cameras yeah even though that one's got quite a good camera maybe the focus isn't quite as

good this is dual pixel face detection autofocus on this one and this one has the phase detection auto focus but everyone is looking really good but the

lack of any optical or even electronic image stabilization on 4k is a bit of a deal-breaker and this is the reason why I did not actually get the P20 Pro to

review I thought about buying that phone and then I realised that 4k there's no way to get any form of image stabilization you have to use a gimbal

to get nice steady smooth footage which is you know that's just an error hopefully that'll be fixed with the update with the Kirin the new model I

think it's gonna be called the 980 that one hopefully is then going to have electronic image stabilization on 4k have the power to actually do that very

powerful chipset really high speed fast storage that surprised Matt and expected to be that fast I really thought they were going to use even see if I put one speck so nice to see that it is just super quick I roll the performance is really good now the gimmicky toggle button a press it at the top I'm

using that as a camera shutter but there's no way to actually tell it's on it's really silly so when you press that there's no notification it doesn't pop

up saying hey turbo mode is on marketing hype mode on no I don't know why really they've even bothered with it they could they could have put a two-stage camera button here would have been much better and I would have been happier with that actually than just this gonna key a little button thing there no I don't read Chinese I don't actually know what it really said there so maybe someone can correct me in the comments if I'm wrong about that but still it should tell you when it's on so all the premium build very much a premium large almost like a flagship phone really with the cameras front-facing camera it's too white it's kind of overexposing even though I've turned off beautify mode now not really that great portrait mode looks good Kameron general is good low light definitely looks quite good there and they've got that advantage with the megapixels as well having 24 versus 12 you get on save me max 3 so if you're on a budget definitely go when you want a large phone go for this one than mi max 3 check out my review that one up here and now I will be back with a part two you could say of this particular phone here so I need to use it obviously for quite a few days full-on as my main phone check my battery life I'll be back with better life updates full charge times and possibly probably do some low-light video samples as well and some other low-light photography so compare it to the mi max 3 so you can get an idea of just the kind of difference you can expect from there thank you so much for

watching this video if you did like this detailed hands-on review then please do subscribe to the channel and I do hope to catch you back in the next one bye for now