Huawei wowed me with its hypercolourful flagship P20 Pro ($999.99 at Amazon.com) phone and now Honor -- Huawei's sub-brand -- is getting in on the vibrant action with the Honor 10.

The Honor 10 brings the colour without the high price tag however. At only £399 it's half the price of Huawei's top smartphone. International availability hasn't been confirmed yet -- Huawei phones aren't easily available in the US -- but that UK price converts to about $540 or AU$720.

Hue and cry

The phone has an all-glass back that looks vivid blue in some light, but give it a twirl in your fingers and you'll see the hue subtly blend into a deep purple tone. I like it a lot -- as I did the pink and blue Huawei P20 Pro -- as it's much more interesting to look at than the usual grey and black rectangles that pass for phones these days. The new OnePlus 6 has an all-glass design too, and while I like the classy look of the black model, I prefer the Honor's vibrant colours.

Flip it over and you'll see a 5.84-inch screen. Honor has joined the ranks of Huawei, LG, Asus and others in using a cut-out notch that juts into the display at the top and houses the speaker and front-facing camera. You can fill in the gaps either side of the notch to make it look like a solid status bar, if you'd prefer.

The display itself has a 2,280x1,080-pixel resolution and is bright and vibrant, with text easily readable under harsh overhead office lights. There's a fingerprint scanner below the display, although you'd be forgiven for missing it, as it's molded into the bezel. There's no depression where a home button would normally be, which gives the phone a neat, seamless look. The downside is that it makes it a little harder to place your thumb in the right spot in a hurry, but I quickly got used to it. The scanner itself is lightning fast and mostly accurate. It doubles as a touch-sensitive home button when the phone's in use.

Camera doesn't cut the mustard 

There are two camera lenses on the back: a 24-megapixel monochrome sensor and a 16-megapixel colour sensor. Like the Huawei P20 Pro, the camera uses artificial intelligence to analyse the scene being photographed and tweak the image accordingly. 

Also like the P20 Pro, I found those tweaks to be heavy-handed, often boosting saturation -- the blues when it detects a sky, for example -- to unnatural levels. You can turn this setting off altogether and you can also turn off the "boosted" effect after you've taken your shot. I found it best to leave AI mode switched on when shooting, giving me the option to turn it off later if I don't like the tweaks.