Blackview Hero 10
Foldable display tech in a modern and quite affordable Android smartphone
(by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer)
I love reviewing interesting, unusual, novel technology, even if it isn't directly related to my primary field, rugged mobile technology. And so I have, over time, reported in detail on things like the very first affordable Android tablets, unique add-on modules for expanded functionality, unusual underwater cameras, image-stabilizing binoculars, all sorts of other interesting innovations, and one of the first very affordable folding screen smartphones.
I am talking about the Blackview Hero 10, a smartly designed device that makes foldable tech (and a whole bunch of tricks) available for around US$400. That's a huge bargain for a foldable, albeit still twice as much as a generic "white box" Android smartphone. Blackview isn't just any maker of interesting far-east tech; they've been around for years and are one of the few that make truly useful rugged phones and small tablets, so I am somewhat familiar with them. Blackview is also the maker of DokeOS, one of the many customized versions of Android. Sadly, Blackview's discussion forums, while selectable right from the cover page, seem to have been abandoned in 2022. I love forums, but if they are no longer active, take them down.
The Blackview Hero 10
But on to the Hero 10. It's an unfortunate name, because pretty much everyone will think GoPro. Because GoPro has been making Hero action cameras by the many millions for going on two decades. Why Blackview still chose the moniker is beyond me.
Anyway, foldables -- realize right upfront that there are different types of foldables. There are foldables that fold open so that they become tablets with twice the display area. And there are those that fold closed so they become half the size and thus easier to carry around. The Hero 10 is of that variety, it folds in half. You don't get more screen like in foldables that become tablets. You simply get to fold it in half. Which, I found, can have surprising benefits.
The primary raison d'être — reason for being — of the Hero 10 IS that it folds, affordably. It's a cool novelty, an attention getter, and a conversation starter. It was announced via email, and on AliExpress with all the nicely illustrated claims and features Ali is famous for. And the Hero 10 is not just a very affordable foldable, but one with dozens of attractive features. There's a 108mp camera. And a 32mp selfie camera. And a round second screen on the back. And 12GB of RAM, virtually expandable to 36GB. And an OLED screen with up to 1300 nits of peak luminance (we measured more like 800 nits). And fast-charge and a water-drop hinge. And face- AND fingerprint recognition. And "18% better photographic results." And much more.
That's impressive, and the spiel worked. I ordered one on the spot, on my own dime.
The pre-announced Hero 10 arrived even quicker than expected, almost two weeks quicker, so I didn't have to invoke the one-dollar late delivery guarantee (it wasn't clear if you'd get a dollar off, or if the whole thing would then cost just a dollar). As is, the package arrived in typical AliExpress from China packaging, including generous bubble wrap and all, but delivered by the USPS. And despite the bubble protection wrap, the US Postal Service had managed to crush the package so horribly that it's genuinely amazing they even had the gall to deliver it without apology or remedy. See pictures below.
Normally, I'd have returned the thing instantly, but how and where to? I untwisted the crushed box and, miraculously, the device itself survived unharmed. I am fairly certain I had ordered the black version (the Hero 10 Black... haha), but the pink one arrived ("Sakura Purple"). Pretty, but I wanted black.
I charged the phone via its USB-C port and the supplied European-standard power adapter (two round prongs) with US-adapter. The Hero 10 started right up and, wow, impressive. Bright, sharp and brilliant, as OLED screens tend to be. It uses Blackview's own Doke 4.0 OS on Android 13, i.e. there are small differences from standard Android GMS.
First impressions
First impression: wow, that foldable screen is amazing! How can that work? From most angles it looks just like a standard flat glass screen, and in general use it works just like any other smartphone display. However, from certain angles and under certain lighting, you see the folding part. And you also feel it when using the phone. The hinge area isn't perfectly flat. It doesn't affect using the touch screen much, but modern fingers are used to the perfectly flat screen, and the little hinge bumps can be distracting, and they can take away from the usual completely predictable touch experience. The screen can feel a bit less precise and less responsive. It is, however, definitely not a deal killer.
The round screen on the back can be programmed by its own "Back Screen" settings function. You can display the time in different ways, you can select the background image, and you can select what should be shown in the little round display (weather, steps, music, camera). It took me days to figure out how to make it do anything, though; it's not clear what makes it come on. To take a picture that way, you click the volume button.
The Hero 10 can be locked and unlocked in the usable Android ways (pin, password, etc), but also via fingerprint and face recognition. Both work, mostly. The fingerprint scanner is unusual in that it is one of the buttons on the side of the phone. I enabled all three ways of unlocking, and one or the other, or all three combined, usually work.
The folding hinge display
Now what about that "industry-leading waterdrop hinge"? To pretty much everyone, a "waterdrop" hinge would have something to do with it being waterproof or resistant. Important to any smartphone users, and certainly to those rugged systems customers (the Hero 10, of course is NOT one of their rugged products). Anyway, "waterdrop" has nothing to do with sealing against liquids here. It simply means that the foldable screen, viewed from the side, has sort of a waterdrop shape. And, as far as the hinge goes, Blackview claims it still worked after 250,000 folds. So, assuming that opening and closing counts as two folds, if you open and close the Hero 10 25 times a day, it'd be good for 13.7 years.
How does the Hero 10 work in real life? Quite well. Folding the phone in half makes it MUCH more convenient to carry in pockets, amazingly so. Add to that the peace of mind that comes from not having the display exposed when the phone is folded... for some of us, priceless. But what if you do want a case for the Hero 10 anyway? You're not going to easily find one on Amazon. So it's good that the Hero 10 package comes with one. It's just a plastic shell for each half of the phone, but it works fine. As for service, I simply popped in the Ting nano-SIM from my backup phone and service came right up (Ting uses T-Mobile).
The display measures 6.9 inches diagonally and offers 2560 x 1080 pixel resolution. That makes for 403 pixels per inch and a 2.37:1 aspect ratio. This very tall (or very wide) format is well suited for using the phone with Android's split-screen mode that allows you to use two apps splitting the display horizontally or vertically. While Blackview claims up to 1300 nits luminance, we measured 792 nits, which is fine and nicely bright even outside. The small round display in the back has a 1.2 inch diameter and 390 x 390 dots.
The cameras
Cameras are essential in any modern smartphone, and the Hero 10 has three. There's the 32mp user-facing camera. The documentation camera also shows on the small round screen when the phone is closed. Taking a picture that way results in a 3000 x 4000 12mp image. 
There are four image settings for the full screen: 4:3 12mp (4000x3000), 16:9 9mp (4000x2250), 1:1 9mp (3000x3000), and 7mp (4000x1688). The camera's three standard zoom settings are 0.6x, 1x, and 2x. You can also zoom up to 4x. There's a "Beauty" mode with an "AI" slider that goes from 0 to 10, beautifying from not at all to the very max.
Pro mode adds manual white balance (four modes), ISO (100 to 1600), EV (-3 to +3), manual focus, and shutter speed (1/4000 to 0.3 seconds). Video goes from HD (1280 x 720) to FHD (1920 x 1080) and FHD 60 fps, and then 2k (2560x1440). Sorry, no 4k video here, which is hard to understand.
Then there's the 108mp camera that uses the Samsung ISOCELL HM6 imager. That sounds terrific. The imager itself has awesome tech specs, like 120fps 4k video and even 24fps 8k video. 12000 x 9000 pixel resolution. Problem is, it really does not live up to full expectations on the Hero 10. I have seen pictures from other cameras with the ISOCELL HM6, and they are incredible. You can zoom in for awesome, sharp detail. You CAN get that on the Hero 10, but you need to learn how, and live within its limitations. If you just shoot away with the 108mp camera, there is often no discernible gain in detail versus the same picture with the 12mp camera — you zoom in and it looks no better than it does on the much lower resolution picture.
That has something to do with that special Samsung imager. There's a tech called "binning," where a number of tiny pixels make up one larger pixel. From what I can tell, in order to get a true 108mp picture with all the detail the imager is capable of, you need lots of light, keep the ISO low, and keep the camera completely still. Else, all those many pixels can't do their magic.
And on the Hero 10 you can't do video at any resolution with the 108mp imager. There is also no zoom, and just that one resolution, 12000 x 9000. Can't you just get one of the many advanced camera apps to take better advantage of the ISOCELL HM6 imager? Not in my experience. I tried several, and none show a 108mp setting, or acknowledge the presence of the ISOCELL HM6 imager in any way.
Initially, all that was a bit of a letdown. But then I tried again, in perfect conditions with plenty of light, and the 108mp mode finally kicked in. In the picture below, left is 4000 x 3000 pixel mode, right the 108mp mode with 12000 x 9000 pixels. At first sight, they look just the same. The bottom images are what the blue car looked like when I zoomed in in Photoshop. Big, huge difference.
Performance and battery life
As far as performance goes, the Hero 10 is built around an octa-core MediaTek Helio G99. The chip uses 6nm process technology and has been around since 2022. MediaTek's goals for it were decent mobile gaming, big camera support, responsive displays, smooth streaming and reliable global connectivity. That all worked out quite well, and the Hero 10 feels gratifyingly quick in everyday use. The table below shows how performance compares to a variety of Android devices we've tested at RuggedPCReview.
|
Blackview Hero 10 benchmark performance
|
|
Manufacturer
|
Blackview
|
Getac
|
Lenovo
|
Samsung
|
Samsung
|
|
Model
|
Hero 10
|
ZX80
|
Tab K10
|
S10+
|
Tab Active4 Pro
|
|
Type
|
Folding phone
|
Rugged tablet
|
Tablet
|
Phone
|
Tablet
|
|
Year tested
|
2024
|
2024
|
2022
|
2021
|
2024
|
|
Display size
|
6.9
|
8.0
|
10.1
|
6.3
|
10.1
|
|
Display luminance
|
792 nits
|
916 nits
|
363 nits
|
NA nits
|
790 nits
|
|
CPU brand
|
MediaTek
|
Qualcomm
|
MediaTek
|
Qualcomm
|
Qualcomm
|
|
CPU model
|
Helio G99
|
SM325
|
MT6762
|
SD855
|
SD778G
|
|
AnTuTu
|
314,744
|
547,919
|
101,620
|
436,732
|
444,370
|
|
Vellamo Metal
|
3,812
|
5,984
|
1,503
|
5,313
|
NA
|
|
Vellamo Multicore
|
4,485
|
7,606
|
2,904
|
5,816
|
NA
|
|
Vellamo Browser
|
9,606
|
11,450
|
2,893
|
9,694
|
NA
|
|
PassMark Mobile
|
9,617
|
14,889
|
4,367
|
8,501
|
12,070
|
|
PCMark 10 Android
|
10,070
|
9,164
|
5,528
|
9,212
|
9,725
|
|
PCMark 10 Battery
|
09:58 hrs
|
16:33 hrs
|
12:02 hrs
|
NA hrs
|
11:38 hrs
|
|
Geekbench 5 Single
|
729
|
872
|
167
|
722
|
790
|
|
Geekbench 5 Multi
|
2,028
|
3,006
|
950
|
2,570
|
2,826
|
|
Geekbench 5 Vulkan
|
1,340
|
2,869
|
89
|
NA
|
2,443
|
|
GeekBench 5 OpenCL
|
1,311
|
3,149
|
NA
|
2,510
|
2,252
|
The benchmark results confirm the phone's quick, responsive performance. The numbers, of course, don't come close to those of the latest premium smartphones, but they match up quite well to some pretty serious Android gear we've tested in our lab.
What about battery life? According to Blackview, the Hero 10 comes with 4,000mAh spread over two batteries, a larger one and a smaller one. Without knowing the Voltage, mAh means nothing. One of my benchmarks says the batteries run 5 Volt, so that would amount to 20 watt-hours. The strenuous, continuous PCMark Battery test yielded 9:58 hours of operation on a charge. That's not bad at all.
The phone comes with 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM. And RAM can be increased with "virtual RAM" to up to a combined total of 36GB, speeding up certain operations. The Hero 10 has 256GB of internal storage, but does not have a card slot. That's a big blunder in my book. What good does it do to have a super-hi res camera that quickly fill up storage when you don't even have a card slot! Major omission.
Parting thoughts
Does all that make the Hero 10 a winner and a keeper? It depends. If your expectation of a foldable is that it opens up into a true, big tablet, the Hero 10 isn't it, because it's the other kind of foldable, the one that folds down to half its size. And that has amazing appeal. I've always loved the old handy little flip-phones of yore, and the Hero 10 is sort of a modern implementation of that (as, of course, the foldable Motorola RAZR is).
I am an Apple guy at heart, though I use and cover all platforms in my work, and so the Hero 10 won't replace my iPhone. But it definitely will replace my backup phone, which was a Samsung S10+. With Samsung having abandoned the fabulous Dex for the Macintosh, there's no more reason for me to have a Samsung phone. The Blackview Hero 10 will do very nicely as an interesting replacement.
As far as the foldable display tech itself goes, it seems to already work much better than I expected. When the Hero 10 is open, it just looks like any other smartphone. Yes, there's that slight bump/ripple at the fold, but it's non-intrusive. As for applications in rugged devices, sealing might be an issue. Everyone expects their handhelds and tablets to be immune to rain or splashing these days, or even a dunk. Sealing to that level ought to be possible, especially in rugged devices where it's not important for devices to be super-thin. – Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, June 2024
Blackview Hero 10 Specs
| Added/changed |
Added 06/2024
|
| Type |
Folding Android smartphone
|
| Processor |
Octa-core MediaTek Helio G99 (2 x 2.2 GHz Cortex-A76, 6 x 2.0 GHz Cortex-A55)
|
| OS |
DokeOS 4.0 Based on Android 13 (Android 14-16 support)
|
| Graphics |
Mali-G57 MC2
|
| Memory |
12GB LPDDR4X, 24GB virtual expansion
|
| Audio |
Dual speakers
|
| Display type |
AMOLED main display, round OLED cover screen, 792 nits measured
|
| Display size/res |
Main screen: Foldable 6.9-inch 2560 x 1080 resolution (403 ppi)
Front cover screen: 1.19-inch 390 x 390 resolution
|
| Digitizer/Pens |
Capacitive multi-touch |
| Storage |
256GB ROM, UFS2.2
|
| Slots |
Dual NANO SIM
|
| Housing |
Est: Aluminum
|
| Temperature |
Unknown
|
Enclosure Class |
Unknown
|
| Drop spec |
Unknown (comes with 2-piece protective case
|
| Security |
Face-unlock, fingerprint unlock, Android 13 security
|
| Size |
Open: 2.95 x 6.65 x 0.32 inches (75 x 169 x 8.1 mm)
Folded: 2.95 x 6.65 x 0.64 inches (75 x 87 x 16.2 mm
|
| Weight |
7.0 ounces (198 grams)
|
| Power |
4000mAh (2700mAh + 1300mAh) 5V, 45W Fast Charge
|
| Cameras |
108mp, f/1.9, 1/1.67-inch Samsung ISOCELL HM6, phase detection autofocus
8mp 120-degree ultra-wide (1440p/30fps, 1080/30fps)
32mp user-facing camera
|
| Wireless Communication |
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth, NFC, GSM/3G/4G LTE, GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BDS)
|
| Wired Interface |
USB Type-C
|
| Price |
We purchased at US$429
|
| Web page |
Blackview Hero 10 page |
