On stage at the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2019) in Dongguan, Huawei’s CEO Richard Yu confirmed that tomorrow (August 10) the world should expect an Honor TV announcement.
Having just announced Huawei’s new cross-device operating system, HarmonyOS, a potential alternative to Android down the line, and a smart device OS in the meantime, Yu revealed that the Honor TV will be the first device/service to run it.
- Our ranking of the best Huawei phones
- Everything about the Huawei Mate 30 Pro
- The full story of the Huawei ban
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard murmurs of Honor launching a TV. In July, Honor lifted the lid on its Honghu 818, a television chipset. This octa-core processor is clearly more capable than your average TV engine.
With support for Motion Estimation/Compensation, HDR, Super Resolution, Noise Reduction, Dynamic Contrast Improvement, Auto Color Management and Local Dimming, it’s clearly smart, and if it’s anything like the products Honor has launched in the smartphone world, it will be competitively priced.
Ultimate connectivity
Those capabilities are all well and good, but when combined with HarmonyOS, they look set to deliver a premium television experience combined with ultimate connectivity, melding phones, smartwatches, speakers, laptops, tablets and more into one journey.
Fire up a video call on your computer, press a button and you can continue it on your phone as you leave your office and walk downstairs to the kitchen. Next, cast it to your smart display as you get on with cooking, and finally, as you take your dinner to your living room, push it to your Honor TV.
Based on the examples Huawei presented, the Honor TV’s camera simply pops up, just like that of the OnePlus 7 Pro, and your conversation can carry on. An evening in front of the TV could take on new meaning with such a seamless cross-device experience and one conversation spanning across rooms and devices.
This could extend through to gaming, with smartphone games likely supported by the TV’s chipset, along with wireless joysticks too. Commute home while blasting baddies to let off some steam on your phone, get home and that same game could just be cast to your TV, or even ready and waiting for you to carry on playing.
With IoT devices on the rise, many of which lack the kind of RAM/storage capacities found in today’s computers and smartphones, much of this processing and storage will likely happen in the cloud.
This gave Huawei a great opportunity to also talk about 5G, but more than that, its Harmony OS is at an advantage being significantly lighter than Android. That’s how it can run on your octa-core TV or smartphone, and your dual-core smartwatch, and how your connected smartwatch can still deliver top-tier experience – by offloading to the cloud.
The Honor TV is expected to either drop in the flesh tomorrow, and if it doesn’t, we could see it at IFA 2019, with tomorrow’s unveiling instead being Honor Vision/Huawei Vision – in other words, the TV version of HarmonyOS.
Stay tuned for more in the coming 24hrs, but if you want to know more about Huawei’s HarmonyOS, its implications for Android and the kinds of devices we can expect to find it on read our news story on it from Huawei Developer Conference 2019.
Via AnanandTech
