Honor Pad 10 review: Affordable power with surprising smarts
The Honor Pad 10’s sleek aluminium body looks far more premium than its price suggests. Picture: Honor.
Not everyone needs to spend big on the latest iPad Pro or Galaxy Tab. The Honor Pad 10 proves it, offering a 12.1-inch 2.5K display, sleek aluminium design, and smart AI tools that make this affordable tablet more than enough for work, study, or play.
The Honor Pad 10 feels far more premium than its price tag suggests. Its 6.29mm-thin all-metal body looks and feels refined, with subtly curved edges that flow neatly into the flat frame for a comfortable, premium feel in the hand. Weighing just 525g, it’s light enough to hold for hours, whether you’re watching films or getting work done.
The tablet sports what Honor calls a starlight ring camera design, which adds a touch of style, while the durable aluminium build gives it reassuring robustness. This is not a flimsy budget slab; it’s solid, cool to the touch, and nicely built.
While you’re not getting an OLED here, the 12.1-inch IPS display is an ideal size with a 2.5K (2560×1600) resolution that delivers crisp detail and punchy colour with DCI-P3 cinema-level colour accuracy and HDR support. The 120Hz refresh rate makes scrolling and animations silky smooth, which is something you don’t always get at this price point. It also has a peak brightness of 500 nits, which is perfect for indoor viewing. The IPS panel delivers solid brightness levels, making text and images look crisp even in well-lit rooms. While it doesn’t quite match the punch or contrast of an OLED display, it still offers vibrant colours and wide viewing angles that make streaming, reading, and everyday use a pleasure.
Honor’s Eye Comfort features like Dynamic Dimming, Circadian Night Display, and Low Blue Light help reduce eye strain whether you’re reading, editing, or bingeing videos late at night.
Let’s be honest, no one buys a tablet for its cameras. The Honor Pad 10’s shooters are serviceable but unremarkable. The rear camera handles document scans and casual shots well enough, while the front camera is sharp enough for video calls.
Under the hood, the Pad 10 runs on the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. There’s no microSD expansion, but most users will find the onboard space sufficient. Honor says the Pad 10 has a 20% CPU and 100 GPU performance increase over the Pad 9.
Day-to-day performance is smooth. Apps launch quickly, multitasking is seamless, and Honor’s MagicOS 9 keeps everything tidy. For casual gaming, it handles lighter titles well and Genshin Impact on moderate settings without drama, just don’t expect it to run graphically heavy games at max detail.
The 10,100mAh battery efficiently delivers excellent battery life, enough for a full day of productivity or entertainment. It supports Honor’s 66W SuperCharger, but it doesn’t come with a charger in the box. It’s a pleasant surprise to see such charging speeds supported at this price. Many tablets in the same bracket still crawl along at half that pace.
Even with heavy multitasking or extended video playback, the battery proves consistent and reliable.
Running MagicOS 9 (based on Android 15), the Pad 10 feels refined, uncluttered, and purpose-built for multitasking. Features like Magic Portal let you drag text or images between apps instantly with no clunky split screens needed. MagicRing allows seamless content sharing between your Honor phone, laptop, and tablet.
The AI Notes app can transcribe voice recordings, translate between multiple languages, and summarise content intelligently. Honor Docs turns the tablet into a capable productivity station, supporting Office-style documents and AI-assisted writing, no subscriptions required.
For students, writers, and professionals, these tools are handy, especially since the tablet comes with a keyboard cover.
With its six-speaker setup and spatial audio tuning, the Honor Pad 10 delivers surprisingly rich sound that is loud, clear, and immersive enough to enjoy films or music without headphones.
It also supports Honor’s keyboard cover and stylus, turning it into a portable workstation. If you purchase the tablet from Harvey Norman, a keyboard cover is included in the package.
The Honor Pad 10 offers a premium design, solid performance, and useful AI tools at an affordable price, especially when bundled with the Honor keyboard cover. It’s ideal for work, study, or entertainment, making it one of the best value Android tablets of 2025.
€359 Harvey Norman
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