| Pros | Cons |
| Big, sharp screen | EMUI 9 isn't great |
| Great design | Plastic build |
| Brilliant value | No fast charging |
“The Honor 10 Lite looks like it should cost twice as much as it does and the illusion is only slightly ruined in use. It's one of the best budget phones you can get, but there are a few minor issues.”
The Honor 10 Lite is a newer, cheaper, less powerful take on the Honor 10, but while it has a distinctly budget price (coming in at around £185 on Pay As You Go or from £14 per month on contract at the time of writing) this is far from a basic phone.
In fact, it actually beats the Honor 10 in some ways and has highlights such as a big, sharp screen, a dual-lens camera and lots of storage.
So is this the sub-£200 champ or are there chinks in its armour? Read on to find out.
The Honor 10 Lite has a 6.21-inch 1080 x 2340 screen with a pixel density of 415 pixels per inch. So it’s both big and sharp (albeit not quite a match for the resolution of flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S9). It is in fact larger and slightly higher resolution than the standard Honor 10.
It’s an IPS LCD screen with a modern 19.5:9 aspect ratio, meaning it’s taller and narrower than traditional 16:9 phones. It’s also bright, offers good viewing angles and can have its colours tweaked to suit your own preferences.
One of the really impressive things about the Honor 10 Lite’s screen though is that thanks to tiny bezels and a teardrop notch there’s a screen-to-body ratio of around 90%, which means this big 6.21-inch screen fits in the sort of body size you’d typically expect from a 5.2-inch phone and is therefore very easy to use one handed.
From the back the Honor 10 Lite looks a lot like the Honor 10, at least at first glance. It has a back that (in some shades) gradually shifts between two colours from top to bottom and it’s designed so that beams of lights will streak across it.
It’s a good look, but where the Honor 10 achieved this effect with glass, the Honor 10 Lite is plastic, so this is likely one major way where money has been saved.
Still, while it’s therefore less premium, it’s nonetheless one of the most striking budget phones you’ll find.
We largely covered the front of the phone in the screen section above, but thanks to its small bezels that looks good too, and at just 8mm thick the Honor 10 Lite is certainly slim.
The Honor 10 Lite has an octa-core Kirin 710 chipset, with four cores running at 2.2GHz and four going at 1.7GHz. It’s a reasonably speedy mid-range chipset that will struggle with some demanding games but should prove zippy for most general tasks, especially as it’s coupled with 3GB of RAM.
And on the subject of games, it does at least have a GPU Turbo mode, which boosts its gaming performance in compatible titles.
Power is another area where the standard Honor 10 has the Lite model beat, as that phone has a high-end chipset and more RAM, but for the money this is still a very solid setup.
You get two lenses on the back of the Honor 10 Lite, as there’s both a 13MP f/1.8 main lens and a 2MP depth sensor. The camera can also use AI to recognise and adjust settings for 22 different scenes, so you can just point and shoot and generally get good results. In fact, pictures look good even at night, thanks to an ‘AIS Super Night Shoot’ mode.
If there’s a criticism its that colours aren’t always totally natural, especially when using the AI modes, but that aside this is a very strong showing for the money.
The front-facing camera is good too, as this is a 24MP one, so you can take detailed, high-resolution selfies. It also includes a portrait mode allowing you to adjust the lighting in a shot, and it has a bunch of beauty tools. As usual less is more with these tools, but it’s nice to have them as an option.
The main features that we haven’t already mentioned include a fingerprint scanner on the back of the Honor 10 Lite. This is a standard scanner and nowhere near as fancy as the in-screen scanners that phones like the Huawei Mate 20 Pro have, but it gets the job done.
The Honor 10 Lite also runs Android 9 Pie, so its software is completely up to date at the time of writing, though it does have the fairly heavy EMUI 9 overlay on top. If you’ve used another recent Huawei or Honor phone then you’ll know what to expect here. It’s not our favourite interface but it doesn’t detract too much from the Android OS underneath.
There’s a 3,400mAh battery in the Honor 10 Lite. That translates to solid but fairly average life, so in other words you’ll get a day out of this phone, but not much more. There’s also no fast charging or wireless charging here, but we wouldn’t really expect that for the money.
Memory comes in at a beefy 64GB though and there’s even a microSD card slot on top of that, so storage is one thing you shouldn’t run short of.
Connectivity options meanwhile include 4G, Bluetooth 4.2 and NFC, so yes, you can make contactless payments with the Honor 10 Lite.
The Honor 10 Lite is a remarkable phone for the money. We were blown away by the Honor 10 when that launched and while this is a lesser phone overall, given the price it’s every bit as impressive.
The screen, design and camera are all great for the money while almost everything else is at least good. We’re not huge fans of the UI and while this might look high-end it certainly doesn’t offer high-end performance, but you’ll be hard pushed to find a better phone for under £200.
