Looking for a relatively affordable mid-level phone? There are few better than Honor's new flagship. For £399 this phone delivers plenty of bang for your buck - it's super value for that money as you'll see. 

This latest Honor phone takes a lot of cues from the Huawei P20 including a notch design, enhanced dual cameras, more powerful insides - but without a significant price bump between the two generations.

Here's the skinny on how the Honor 10 differs from the Honor 9.

Honor 10 vs Honor 9: Design

• Honor 10: 149.6 x 71.2 x 7.7mm; 153g
• Honor 9: 147.3 x 70.9 x 7.45mm; 155g

The Honor 9 did away with the rear-positioned fingerprint scanner of the Honor 8, instead placing one to the front, much like a Home key as you'll find on an increasing number of devices these days.

That has been carried on into the Honor 10 but with one key difference. Honor says it is 'under glass' but in reality, it's simply flush with the rest of glass front. It's not recessed. But in reality the experience is not remarkably different than many other fingerprint sensors. 

New is the almost full-front screen (see below) as well as a notch at the top of the screen. The mirrored back comes in Phantom Blue, Phantom Green, Midnight Black and Glacer Grey finishes. 

Honor 10 vs Honor 9: Display

• Honor 10: 5.84-inch, 2,280 x 1,080 Full HD+ resolution IPS LCD with 2.5D glass
• Honor 9: 5.15-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution IPS LCD with 2.5D glass

The Honor 10 offers a marked upgrade on the Honor 9 in terms of greater screen resolution (offering 432ppi) and a much lareger 5.84-inch display. Again it's covered with 2.5D glass. 

Honor 10 vs Honor 9: Battery, hardware & software

• Honor 10: 3,400mAh; Honor 9: 3,200mAh battery capacity
• Honor 10: Kirin 970 (2.36GHz) chipset, 4GB RAM; Honor 9: Kirin 960 (2.4GHz) chipset, 4GB RAM
• Honor 10: EMUI 8.1 software skin over Android 8.1; Honor 9: EMUI 5.1 software skin over Android 7.0

In addition to the updated design, the Honor 10 ramps things up on the hardware front. With the same Kirin 970 processor as in the P20 (4x2.36 GHz cores plus 4x1.8 GHz), again paired with 4GB RAM. So the Honor 10 is, in terms of its core specs, as powerful as the Huawei P20.

This time there's a huge increase in the standard on-board storage, up to 128GB from 64GB (which in itself was double the amount of storage included in the preceding Honor 8). 

The Honor 10 can take two SIMs as usual for Honor handsets, but this year the comoany has decided not to have microSD capability in the second slot.

On the software front, the Honor 10 delivers a similar experience to what you'll find in the mother brand Huawei P20. With Android 8.1 running in the background and EMUI 8.1 running over the top of that, it's not the cleanest user experience but it is much improved on older versions.

Speaking of battery, the Honor 10 ups the capacity to 3,400mAh - which is a 200mAh increase compared to the Honor 9. Naturally, there's USB-C once again as well as a headphone jack. 

Honor 10 vs Honor 9: Cameras

• Honor 10: 20-megapixel monochrome, 12-megapixel colour rear-facing dual cameras
• Honor 9: 20-megapixel monochrome, 12-megapixel colour rear-facing dual cameras

The Honor 9 went down the Huawei route of opting for a 20MP monochrome and 12MP colour one in a similar fashion to the Huawei P10.

With the Honor 10 there are 16-megapixel colour and 24-megapixel monochrome sensors paired together with f/1.8 apertures. There's also a huge resolution 24MP sensor on the front, too - selfies are becoming key.

As you'll see, the camera has "AI camera" written next to it. That's because Honor is going big on artificial intelligence this time around, with automatic scene-recognition features built into the camera's software.

You will see this mostly through the smart recognition of subjects (such as food, animals, landscapes and so on). Portrait lighting is also included front and back.

When you compare Honor with Huawei, the main thing to note is that there's no Leica affiliation and so the optics and software are a bit different.

Honor 9 vs Honor 8: Conclusion

For its £399 price point, the Honor 10 is an incredibly interesting proposition. We're expecting it to undercut the launch of the OnePlus 6 quite significantly while it's at least £150 cheaper than the Huawei P20 that it shares so much with.

There's so much to like and with such a top-notch feature list you have to be really sure about spending more. 

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