What the heck is an AI Phone?! - Honor 10 Showcase
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,700 words · ~8 min read
0:00
so honor is sponsoring an early look
0:03
actually i don't know if by the time this comes out it's going to be early at
0:07
all but uh that's not really the point the point is
0:11
we are checking out the honor 10 and i absolutely love doing stuff for honor
0:16
because i get to make this joke over and
0:19
over and over again
0:22
are you ready to do the shoot for honor
0:29
hey which video are you editing right now
0:33
is it the one for honor no
0:37
hey tyler did that product arrive yet for honor
0:55
so the highlight features of this thing include an octocore processor a 19x9
1:02
aspect ratio screen with notch and an
1:05
npu or neural processing unit
1:10
and it's very
1:13
shiny does it look as good on camera as it
1:16
does in person dang so we'll start with the obligatory
1:20
unboxing you get a sim removal tool you get a bunch of documentation you get
1:24
oh that's actually kind of a nice touch they include
1:29
a case so that at least while you wait for your
1:33
like you know nicer one or whatever you're not going to get that stupid
1:38
first scratch on the phone that you're you're otherwise likely to it actually
1:42
includes a screen protector as well so those kinds of things are always a nice
1:45
touch they've got a supercharged power supply right here with oops
1:50
well uh i'm sure you'll get one that's compatible with your region and a usb
1:54
type-c cable with an adorable purple inset
1:58
of course it's no big secret but i think unboxings are boring so
2:02
let's have a look at the phone itself i've actually got a couple of them i've
2:06
got that sick purple and blue iridescent
2:10
they call it aurora gradient or something like that finish and then i've
2:14
got a more plain blue one that quite frankly uh you should be able to tell by
2:18
now but i think this one looks so much better looking at the physical
2:23
layout of the phone there are a couple of things that i think some folks are
2:26
going to find polarizing like it's really the age of phablets these days
2:31
but this is a comfortably one-handable phone
2:36
like you can actually type
2:41
at least if you got swiftkey on anyway that comes pre-loaded which is nice with
2:44
one hand on it but i don't know if everyone is going to like the duplicated
2:49
home button so you've got a software one as well as a built-in one in hardware
2:54
and that's actually where the fingerprint sensor is so it bucks the trend in terms of fingerprint sensor it
2:59
bucks the trend in terms of headphone jack which for me anyway is a really
3:03
nice inclusion and then it sticks with the trend for the display notch i'm
3:09
happy to see a more handleable option though and personally i'm a really big
3:13
fan of glass backs because even though actually this one i think i've already
3:17
got some fingerprints on even though they do tend to get fingerprinted up
3:21
pretty easily what's nice about the glass
3:24
is that at least they're easy to clean then they're perfect another choice they
3:30
made that's going to be controversial no matter how you slice it is their use of
3:34
an ips display so right now the main two
3:37
choices are OLED or lcd ips
3:42
and they've both got pros and cons with OLED having perfect blacks and the
3:47
ability to you know show the time even when the screen is off for example with
3:51
ips having the advantage of basically no
3:54
chance of running into burning issues so
3:58
it's a good ips they're boasting 96 coverage of ntsc and
4:04
it looks after i turned off the vivid profile that was loaded by default
4:07
subjectively really freaking good
4:10
but everyone's going to have their own feelings on a decision like this
4:17
now this is something really interesting that i picked up on the way that they've
4:20
implemented the notch is not like pure notch or pure knot notch so you can see
4:25
that the display stretches up into the notch area when you're vertical but
4:28
check this out it actually does a little trickery thing so you watch that change
4:33
to curved and then it cuts the notch out
4:37
when you put video in landscape mode which personally i think is a really
4:41
nice touch another thing that you can actually do while i'm on the subject of
4:45
cool little uh software tricks is you can turn the
4:48
notch off entirely
4:54
and there are actually some nice touches as well wireless charging isn't
4:57
supported but it does support four and a half amp five volt fast charging and
5:02
their facial recognition it is shockingly fast so i've got it open here
5:07
it's looking for my face bam that's really impressive and this
5:12
one's cool there's a feature on here called smart rotate
5:17
that lets the screen rotation follow the direction of your face can your phone do
5:21
this
5:26
and it stays in portrait mode cool right anyway the big feature on the
5:30
phone is really on the rear shooter so it's a dual rear shooter it's got a 16
5:34
megapixel f 1.8 color sensor and then a
5:38
24 megapixel black and white and the whole thing is powered by their neural
5:43
processing unit or npu so using their
5:47
npu they can actually recognize the subject of a photo and then adjust the
5:52
way that it looks in order to make it more pleasing
5:57
let's go try it out on a few things shall we
6:01
all right so let's do some test shots with the ai camera first let's do with
6:05
no ai hi james
6:09
i'm trying to do you a service here by taking a good picture of you not easy
6:14
now let's turn on ai photography and it has identified that this is a person
6:21
and it looks like it went and applied a background blur effect
6:26
so that's an interesting thing for it to do on its own let's try some food
6:31
that is not very photogenic food but i'm sure it tastes good look at that
6:36
it identified food thought it was person for a second there all right a car
6:39
should be a pretty easy one
6:43
yep wow that did not take long the instant i turned on ai it was like yup
6:48
that's a car let's find some nature
6:51
dang nature you pretty yep i get a little flower icon
6:56
so i want to talk about what an npu actually does while we have a look at
7:00
the shots from the ai versus non-ai photo comparison here subjectively i
7:06
like a more natural look to my photos so i would probably have it off in many
7:12
cases but the underlying technology here is
7:16
really the big story to me we've been at the point for a while now where a phone
7:21
CPU can be expected to do all of the normal stuff that you'd want from it
7:26
really well you know run the ui smoothly
7:29
bring up your apps list open apps whatever the case may be without
7:34
a ton of perceptible leg so what an npu
7:38
does is it is a specialized processor it actually gets dedicated silicon that is
7:43
designed for convoluted neural networks so this doesn't mean that all of a
7:47
sudden you can just turn on ai mode and run around in the world with you know
7:52
pointing your phone's camera at things and it's just gonna start to
7:56
have a broad understanding of the world but what it does mean is that a neural
8:01
network model one that would have to be trained by a very powerful computer
8:06
probably in a data center somewhere can be more easily understood using this
8:12
kind of client-side neural networking technology so the powerful server trains
8:18
the model creates a simplified version of it that
8:22
honor will push to your phone with an update and then your npu does what's
8:26
called inferencing in order to feed that model
8:30
some new piece of data like you're pointing your phone at a cat
8:34
and then infer what it's supposed to be
8:37
from the model that it has downloaded so at this point the npu is being used
8:42
primarily to monitor usage patterns and then optimize the processor's use of
8:47
power so that you'll get as much battery life as possible out of the phone
8:50
and to recognize photography subjects with the camera and then adjust the
8:55
camera's settings accordingly so
8:58
calling it ai is a little bit optimistic
9:02
it's not like it's got like jarvis built into your phone or anything like that so
9:06
right now it has the ability to uh recognize an animal or a pet but new
9:12
models that honor could push via updates could give it the capability of being
9:16
able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog and a a a possum that
9:21
one's unlikely but like a possum for example meaning that it can in fact get
9:26
smarter over time even if the actual training doesn't take place on the
9:30
device itself so that's pretty much my rundown of the honor 10. you guys can
9:34
find a link with more information in the video description so thanks to honor for
9:39
sponsoring this video thanks to you guys for watching it if you guys disliked it
9:43
you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the
9:47
stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our
9:51
merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which
9:54
you should totally join