Honor Play 10 announced - Helio G81, 5000 mAh battery and Android Go

Honor has quietly unveiled a new budget smartphone - the Play 10. It's not a flagship or a camera phone, but it has everything you need for everyday tasks: a large screen, a big battery and Android Go that doesn't overload the system.

What's inside:

• Screen - 6.74" LCD with HD+ resolution (720 x 1600)
• Processor - MediaTek Helio G81, Mali-G52 MC2
• Memory - up to 4 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, expandable up to 1 TB via microSD
• Battery - 5000 mAh, 10W charging via USB-C
• Cameras - 13 megapixel main, 5 megapixel front
• Protection - IP52 (water splash and dust), fingerprint scanner in the button
• Other - FM radio, Bluetooth 5.1, Wi-Fi 5, 3.5mm audio jack.
• Available colours: Midnight Black, Starry Purple, Ocean Cyan.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this model is a special version of the Android Go system. It was first released in 2017 as a variant of Android 8.0 Oreo. This stripped-down version required only 512 GB of RAM to run. Due to this limit, there could be no more than 4 running applications in memory. For context, the same year saw the release of the flagship Samsung Galaxy S8, which had 4GB of RAM.

Despite the fact that today's budget phones have the same characteristics as the flagships of 8 years ago, the Android Go project is alive and well. The fact is that the appetite for the system and modern applications has also increased over this time, and where the flagship felt comfortable 8 years ago, budget models are now struggling to make ends meet. Android Go has an optimised system for lower consumption, some system animations are disabled, and applications such as Gallery or Google Search have special simplified versions that require fewer resources.