Huawei’s Nova 10 Series has launched in South Africa, bringing with it the Nova 10, Nova 10 Pro and the surprise Nova 10 SE. These aren’t part of Huawei’s flagship line, that title still goes to the P-series. But if you’re in the market for a budget or midrange device, these are the new Huawei kids on the block.
Going pro
We’ll start off with the Nova 10 Pro. The first thing you’ll notice is the screen. It’s comfortably big at 6.7in. Perfect for watching Netflix during load shedding (which you’ll probably be doing a lot of if we stay at Stage 5). The screen you’re watching on doesn’t slouch either. You’re working with a curved 1,200 x 2,652 OLED display. It’s rocking a 120Hz refresh rate for a smoother experience, whether you’re scrolling or gaming, and HDR 10 support.
Where Huawei really shines is camera performance. That’s the main selling point of the Nova 10 Pro. There are a tonne of camera features to play around with. In the rear, you’ve got a 50MP f/1.8 main sensor, coupled with an 8MP f/2.2 macro sensor and a 2MP f/2.4 sensor that’ll handle depth sensing.
Up front, you get dual selfie cams. The 60MP f/2.4 ultrawide sensor is joined by an 8MP f/2.2 sensor to assist with portrait shots. The camera app is filled with plenty of gimmicky features that’ll keep you occupied for a few hours. One of which is the zoom, which supports 2x optical zoom and 5x digital zoom.
And if you’re looking for a speedy charge, then you may be pretty impressed with Huawei SuperCharge. Huawei claims that the 100W charger is able to give you a full charge in 20 minutes or less. That’s faster than it takes for a pizza to arrive. It’s charging a 4,500mAh battery which should keep you going through load shedding, at the very least.
Going non-pro
Next up is the Nova 10, which drops the ‘Pro’ from the name, plus a few thousand bucks from the price. Not much differs from the Pro model, besides a few quality of life changes you may want to get your hands on. The first thing you’ll notice is that the screen is smaller than the Pro, coming in at 6.6in. It also features an HDR10, OLED display, with a 120Hz refresh rate but scales down the resolution to 1,080 x 2,400.
You’ll struggle to spot the differences between the two device’s cameras. This is good because Huawei hasn’t compromised on its best-selling feature. The Nova 10 non-pro drops the front-facing 8MP sensor and autofocus from the leftover 60MP sensor.
The differences extend to the battery as well. The Nova 10’s battery is slightly smaller at 4,000mAh and instead of 100W fast charging, you only get 66W. That’s still miles faster than any of Samsung’s flagships though.
(Don’t) Crack it open
On the inside, you’ve got a choice of either 128GB or 256GB for storage, with 8GB of RAM keeping everything running. Unfortunately, neither of the Nova’s has a chipset that supports 5G. Both devices are running a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 4G chipset.
The Huawei Nova 10 Pro and Nova 10 are currently available in South Africa and we have the pricing to accompany them. To grab the better of the two, the Nova 10 Pro, you’ll need to fork out R16,000. To get the Nova 10, you’re looking at paying R13,000. The Nova 10 SE is yet to receive a release date or pricing – but we’ll keep you updated.