India’s budget smartphone segment is the most active and decisive one right now, with a plethora of phone makers trying to dethrone Xiaomi and seize the pole position. Well, the Chinese giants are cluttering the market with new and updated smartphones every couple of months. Honor is leading the pack here by following up its budget effort, Honor 8C with the Honor 10 Lite, which we’re here to talk about.

Honor 10 Lite: What’s in the Box

Honor recently made a minor yet delightful change to its packaging and we now see the device on the box itself. Here’s everything you will find inside the Honor 10 Lite box:

  • Honor 10 Lite (without a doubt!)
  • 5V/2A charging adapter
  • Micro USB charging cable
  • Silicone case
  • SIM ejector tool
  • Information leaflets

One thing I particularly like about mid-range phones is that they now come with a pre-applied screen protector. A great touch for budget consumers.

Right from the get-go, Honor 10 Lite looks like a premium smartphone. The glass-like finish on the rear and dewdrop notch on the front will capture your interest and they don’t make it feel like a mid-range device. The smartphone borrows design cues from its elder sibling, the Honor 10, as well as the affordable Honor 8C that I reviewed earlier last year.

The Honor 10 Lite looks absolutely stunning and matches up to its competitors. However, as is the case with glossy polycarbonate phones, it’s also a fingerprint magnet and scratches really easily. Our unit already has a lot of micro-scratches all over, so I suggest using that case provided in the box.

The earpiece has now been pushed to the very top and the notification LED resides in the bottom bezel. The power button and volume rocker sitting above it on the right are sufficiently clicky, the left side is totally clean, the bottom houses the microUSB charging port, the 3.5mm headphone jack, and the speaker grill, and the SIM slot is found at the top.

Honor 10 Lite: Display

Well, I’m not mincing any words when I say that the display on the Honor 10 Lite is simply gorgeous. It may not be an AMOLED display but instead, a 6.21-inch Full-HD+ LCD IPS screen with a dewdrop notch that’s my favorite implementation for the notch to date.

We’ve stepped foot into 2019 and I’m happy to see that Honor 10 Lite comes backed by Android 9 Pie-based EMUI 9. Yes, it’s not really something to boast about, but once you learn about the fragmented state of the Android ecosystem, well, you know that it’s surely a thing to celebrate.

While you would expect Android 9 Pie to bring AI features in tow, like Adaptive Brightness or Adaptive Battery and Digital Wellbeing tools, they’re nowhere to be found on the Honor 10 Lite. EMUI has its own granular controls for these features.

The performance of the Honor 10 Lite is consistent for the most part, however, it takes a bit of a nosedive when you’re operating it hastily, or have too many apps opened or playing heavy games such as PUBG Mobile. We will talk about all of this in a little detail below, but before that, let’s get the hardware specs out of the way.

Honor 10 Lite: Benchmarks

Though we’ve already shed light on the performance on the Honor 10 Lite and we know it is not going to disappoint, well, still here are some of the popular benchmark numbers for those who give it a ton of weight. The Honor 10 Lite has a single- and multi-core score of 1530 and 5238 on Geekbench, whereas the Kirin 710 scores over 120,000 on the AnTuTu test bench.

Cameras have now become an important factor for when you’re making a buying decision. The Honor 10 Lite packs in the same dual rear-camera module as the Honor 8C, including the 13MP (f/1.8) primary sensor and the 2MP depth sensor. Well, there’s not much more you can expect from a budget phone but Honor still offers a 24MP (f/2.0) camera on the front to help capture some stunning selfies.

I spent the better half of the last week with this smartphone and well, the cameras on the Honor 10 Lite are probably the least impressive aspect here. I remember I liked the looks of the Honor 8C too but the cameras there were lackluster and I just don’t want to repeat myself but the same is the case here. The photos captured using the Honor 10 Lite aren’t really good. You can check out some of the samples we clicked right here:

The photos captured from the Honor 10 Lite in daylight look vivid and beautiful, thanks to the AI working its magic in the background. It identifies the objects and adjusts the colors accordingly, mostly making the photos look a little oversaturated. The photos clicked are sharp and have decent detail, all of which seems lost even if you zoom in a bit. It will, however, work out in your favor if you post to social media platforms often.

Honor 10 Lite Camera Samples: Low Light

The low-light and artificial light scenarios are where the Honor 10 Lite takes a backseat. It does capture the scene well, it illuminates it too, but the details are all lost in the process. The low light photos generally look like oil paintings when you zoom in, which is a sign of the sensor not capturing enough detail. The shadows are also often too much, and contrast in the resulting images is off the mark.

Honor 10 Lite Camera Samples: Selfies/ Portraits

As for the selfies and portraits, well, the photos captured using the front camera have excessive beautification going on that smoothens out the skin a lot. This happens even when the beauty mode is off, which only suggests how artificial the skin tone is going to look when you activate it.

Honor 10 Lite Camera Samples: Night Mode

Finally, Honor has also baked a night mode into this sub-Rs 15,000 smartphone and no, there’s no need for it here, as it doesn’t work wonders. The Honor 10 Lite would certainly capture more light in this mode, but you have to wait a good 5 seconds and the photos will look too bright, with the painting effect.

Honor 10 Lite: Video Samples

The Honor 10 Lite is capable of capturing up to 1080p videos at 60fps, which is a great addition to this budget phone on the company’s part. The smartphone also packs in EIS (Electronic Image stabilization) support, so the videos captured are stable but you can easily notice the wobble here. It isn’t the most stabilized video but it’ll get the work done:

Honor 10 Lite: Audio and Telephony

The bottom-firing speaker on the Honor 10 Lite is pretty good and gets really loud. The sound output isn’t the best though, it’s a bit tinny and the high-pitched instruments take over the vocals, thus, disrupting the experience. The sound output is flat with no bass either, and I’m not its biggest fan.

Further, I had been using the Honor 10 Lite with my primary Jio SIM and the network, as well as call reception, have been good. The company boasts that it uses AI to enhance the quality but I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary.

Connectivity is one aspect where the Honor 10 Lite has improved over the Honor 10. The latter was a great phone, but it included only a dual nano-SIM card tray with no memory card support. The Honor 10 Lite fixes the same with the inclusion of a hybrid dual-SIM tray. It can either hold 2 nano-SIM cards or a SIM card and microSD card to expand storage up to 512GB.

Honor 10 Lite: Battery Life

The Honor 10 Lite packs inside a modest-sized 3,400mAh battery, which is the same as the Honor 10. And well, the similarity doesn’t end there as the battery life is almost exactly the same as well.

Honor 10 Lite: Is it Honorable Enough?

We’ve now approached the most important and conclusive section of the review, i.e. the judgment section. The judgment for whether you should buy the Honor 10 Lite or not. I would never say that Honor 10 Lite (starts at Rs 13,999) is a bad device or that you should avoid it, well, because it is not. The device comes laden with modern quirks like a dewdrop notch, a glass finish, Android 9 Pie out of the box, and offers solid performance at a budget price.

CONS:

  • Fingerprint magnet
  • Scratch prone
  • Inferior cameras
  • Micro USB charging

In a world now saturated with Redmi and ZenFones, Honor is trying its best to offer a device that checks all the right boxes. The Honor 10 Lite has a standout design, modern waterdrop notch, and even the latest software features out of the box but still, it’s doomed because of the lackluster cameras – a long-running shortcoming in budget Honor phones.