Honor Pad 10 Review – Big, Beautiful Budget Tablet with Extras Aplenty

Not everyone needs or can afford a cutting-edge laptop or tablet which is where the likes of the affordable Honor Pad 10 comes into play. Intended as a successor to last year’s Honor Pad 9, the Honor Pad 10 aims to up the ante for value with a number of hardware improvements while keeping it at the same competitive price as last year. 

Honor Malaysia kindly provided us a sample for field testing and after taking it for a whirl, here’s our Honor Pad 10 review where we share if their latest budget tablet is worth the money.

Honor Pad 10 Review – Build and Design

The successor to last year’s Honor Pad 9, the Honor Pad 10 retains the same screen size and is slightly lighter and thinner with the most immediate difference being a repositioned rear camera housing that gets pushed into a corner; its predecessor placed it centrally on one edge of the backplate. Honor has also used what they refer to as corundum-infused aluminium, the same material found in certain precious stones that enhances durability by 30% to make the chassis more scratch and nick resistant.

@hitechcentury Here’s what is in the box for the new Honor Pad 10, their latest budget tablet that blends a wireless keyboard case, a stylus, a large 12.1-inch display and a huge battery in a slim form factor at a modest price! Check out our full Honor Pad 10 review in the link for more deets! NGL- seriously good bang for the buck! #fyp #honorpad10 #tech #malaysia #techtok #hitechcentury #unboxing @honormalaysia ♬ Aesthetic – Tollan Kim

Aesthetics aside, the biggest updates under the hood primarily consist of a larger battery, a newer and more capable chipset and a slightly downgraded rear camera array that gets swapped to an 8MP model versus its predecessor’s 13MP sensor.

The backplate of our Honor Pad 10 review sample is done up in a shade of Cyan which is a metallic teal finish that looks rather pleasant to the eye while being resistant to fingerprints. Beyond the distinctive cyan colourway, the backplate is unremarkable save for the Honor logogram set in the middle and the circular camera housing that houses a single 8MP camera and an LED flash in the corner.

Intended for use primarily in landscape orientation, the tablet has three speakers flanking its left and right sides for a total of six. The right side has the addition of a USB-C port for charging duties. The top hosts a power button and volume rocker while the bottom side is otherwise bare. There’s no microSD or SIM card tray as the design itself is WiFi only with non-expandable storage.

Up front, our Honor Pad 10 review sample hosts a 12.1-inch 2.5K resolution TFT LCD display quoted for 500 nits peak brightness, a 120Hz refresh rate and 100% DCI-P3 with one edge featuring a single 8MP camera for selfies and video calls. Of note is that the display has both Dynamic Dimming and Circadian Night Display certification from TÜV Rheinland along with their AI Defocus and DC Dimming tech to minimise eye strain. Combined, this lends it a level of clarity, colour rendition and sharpness that exceeds many competing midrange devices.

In terms of overall build quality, the Honor Pad 10 looks and feels sturdy with attention paid to its ergonomics. The flat front and rear along with its curved corners make it easy to hold one-handed.

Beyond the tablet itself, our Honor Pad 10 review sample also ships with a rather interesting array of kit. You get an Honor Smart Bluetooth keyboard case, a 35W charger with accompanying USB-C cable, some warranty paperwork and an Honor Pencil stylus as well as the rather quaint addition of a faux leather stylus storage case. The back of the stylus case itself has a sticker that lets you stick it onto the back of the keyboard case for convenient storage. It’s a welcome additional freebie and one that helps keep the stylus from getting lost when on the move.

The provided Honor Smart Bluetooth keyboard case features a fairly standard design that latches onto and protects the tablet’s backplate with the front featuring a non-removable wireless keyboard with a tiny on/off switch and a USB-C port to charge it on the side. Just above the keyboard is a narrow groove that lets you angle the tablet into the proper position for work at about a 35-degree angle. 

Unfortunately, this is the only angle you can set it to and while it works best if you’re working on a desk, it’s a bit too steep if you’re using it on your lap like, say on a train or bus. At first blush, the solid build quality of the Honor Pad 10 and the sheer amount of extra bundled kit it has straight out of the box make for exceptional value.

Honor Pad 10 Review – Performance and Benchmarks

The Honor Pad 10 enjoys a number of performance and hardware upgrades over its predecessor with the key upgrade being a faster, more capable Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor. A late 2023 midrange octacore chipset, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 SoC is built on a 4nm processor paired with an Adreno 720 GPU, offering improved overall performance over the prior Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset used in the Honor Pad 9. On paper, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 is rated for a 50% improvement in GPU performance, a 15% bump up in CPU performance and 20% better power efficiency.

Our Honor Pad 10 review sample also has 8GB RAM paired with an additional 8GB virtual HONOR RAM Turbo off the built-in 256GB of storage. As with prior versions of MagicOS, you can’t modify the amount of virtual RAM or disable it if you’re short on space. 

There’s no microSD card slot so you’ll have to make do with the available storage though it’s plenty for casual users. Rounding things off are fast WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. Running under the hood is the latest Android 15 with Honor’s own MagicOS 9.0 firmware. Here’s how it stacks up on paper:

 

Price	RM1,499
Display	12.1-inch 2.5K Honor Eye Comfort LCD, 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, 120Hz refresh rate
Processor	Snapdragon 7 Gen 3
OS	Android 15 w/ MagicOS 9.0
Memory	8GB RAM w/ 8GB of HONOR Ram Turbo / 256GB storage
Camera	8MP w/ autofocus [rear] / 8MP fixed focus [front]
Battery	10,100mAh lithium polymer w/ 35W SuperCharge charging
Size/Weight	227.07 x 179.28 x 6.29mm / 525g

This array of hardware makes the Honor Pad 10 a capable workhorse for productivity related tasks and general content consumption duties.

With the default settings, our Honor Pad 10 review unit scored the following synthetic benchmarks:

 

3D Mark Steel Nomad Light	488
3D Mark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited	488
3D Mark Wild Life Extreme	1,455
3D Mark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited	1,447
3D Mark Wild Life	5,302
3D Mark Wild Life Unlimited	5,447
Geekbench 6 Single Core	1,116
Geekbench 6 Multi Core	3,134
Geekbench 6 OpenCL	3,602
Geekbench 6 Vulkan	4,135
Geekbench  AI CPU (Quantised)	922
Geekbench AI GPU (Quantised)	481
PC Mark Work 3.0	14,093
PC Mark Battery Life	18 hours 37 mins

In terms of synthetic benchmarks, our Honor Pad 10 review sample easily outpaces its predecessor and is capable of giving other competing midrange tablets, several of which cost quite a bit more while offering a similar array of accessories a run for their money. In both single, multicore and graphics benchmarks, the Honor Pad 10 gives a good accounting of itself.

In day to day use, the Honor Pad 10 offered swift and responsive performance, tackling emails, word processing, web browsing and day to day tasks without issue. The tablet was also able to handle casual gaming too with Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact on default settings.

The display in our Honor Pad 10 review sample doesn’t radically differ from its predecessor and retains the same excellent detail and colour rendition with fair clarity under daylight conditions. It also retains their Defocus Eye Protection, Flicker-free Dimming, Dynamic Dimming and a bevy of other technologies to minimise blue light emissions and to minimise eye strain which made using it for extended periods of time a less arduous experience for the eyes. The six speakers, with three flanking each side of the display, delivers good audio clarity and sufficient detail for the usual round of Netflix binging and for video calls.

Like its predecessor, the Honor Pad 10 features a preinstalled free copy of Honor Docs. There’s added functionality this time around and Honor Docs can work offline and lets you create and edit Word documents, Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides as well as convert images, documents and slides to PDF format.

This makes it highly useful for mobile workers who don’t want to depend on the usual productivity solutions like Google Docs or Microsoft Office and makes for an ideal solution for students and those on a tight budget who don’t have to shell out more for an additional app subscription. Oddly enough, the tablet also includes a copy of WPS Office as a redundancy measure.

Where the Honor Pad 10 gets the edge is its addition of an array of AI-enhanced productivity feature. The AI Deepfake Detection mode that debuted on the Honor Magic7 Pro is present for free which is a welcome feature that detects if video calls are using AI-synthesised faces.

Another feature is the inclusion of AI Notes embedded within Honor Notes. This is of particular value for students and harried professionals looking to help shave off a few minutes of paperwork as it leverages AI to help accomplish a number of writing chores and more.  

The AI Notes feature leverages AI to help you summarise a selection of text, format text to make it more presentable and, especially for those frequently stuck in meetings, the ability to rapidly process captured audio from the meeting, even from multiple speakers, into a series of readable minutes. The tablet also grants free access to an AI Writing feature that lets you clean up and even rephrase a selection of text and even generate text based on a few simple prompts suitable for the occasion be it for a short text to someone or a quick email.

When it comes to battery life, our Honor Pad 10 review sample offered excellent endurance, comfortably lasting slightly north of two days with light use and a day and half with relatively heavy use such as watching movies, light gaming and paperwork.

Should you buy the Honor Pad 10 tablet?

The Honor Pad 10 offers an exceptional amount of value. For what you pay for, you get a solid tablet with a large and vibrant display with overall solid performance for most general users and good battery life.

What sweetens the pot is that Honor throws in a free Honor Smart Bluetooth keyboard case, a free Honor Smart Pencil and a charger too. As it stands, the Honor Pad 10 is a solid contender as one of the most value-packed tablets that money can currently buy in 2025.

Honor Pad 10 review unit courtesy of Honor Malaysia. For more details and to purchase please visit https://www.honor.com/my/tablets/honor-pad-10/