Honor V10 to launch tomorrow, should you expect cheaper Mate 10?

Huawei’s Honor phones are renowned for basically being cheaper versions of Huawei’s current flagships. For instance, the Honor V8 featured the same specs as the Huawei P9 (review), but had a more palatable price tag.

We’re expecting the Honor V10 to be revealed in London on 28 November, but a recent listing on China’s TENAA (basically their version of the FCC or Icasa) has revealed some details.

The listing, spotted by GizChina among several other publications, shows a phone with thin borders and a tall display (TENAA lists a 5.93-inch 2160×1080 display). Other noteworthy features include a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner and a dual camera setup at the back.

The listing also reveals a 3240mAh battery (smaller than the Mate 10), 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a CPU frequency of 2.36Ghz. The latter suggests the Kirin 970 processor, which has four heavyweight cores clocked at 2.36Ghz (in addition to four lightweight A53 cores).

The upcoming Honor V10 is poised to be a cheap Mate 10 or P11 in many ways

If the chip is confirmed, there’s a good chance that the Honor V10 will be the cheapest Kirin 970-toting device for a while, besting the Mate 10 range and probably edging out the Huawei P11 as well.

Huawei’s new chip brings a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to the table, delivering faster AI-related tasks and improved offline inference. Some of the NPU-enabled features touted by Huawei’s Mate 10 include faster scene recognition in the camera department and speedy offline language translation.

What else might an AI chip do in a smartphone? We looked at six uses for the tech, ranging from offline inference to better authentication.