Honor's new TV is packed to the brim with impressive
hardware and does, indeed, feel more like a smartphone in many ways. It's a
shift in mentality that really seems beneficial for the smart TV space. At
least on paper, that is. Starting off with the basics, the Honor Vision, both
vanilla and Pro, features a 55-inch diagonal, 4K, IPS panel with 400 nits peak
brightness, 178° viewing angles, 87% NTSC coverage and TUV Rheinland
certification for blue light protection. It is housed within a very thin (as
little as 6.9mm) metal frame, making for an impressive 94% screen to body
ratio.
But the really impressive bit in our mind are the
hardware internals of the Honor Vision. Namely the Honghu 818, octa-core
chipset, which does sound like smartphone-level silicon in terms of features.
Some of its advanced image processing technologies include Motion Estimate and
Motion Compensation (MEMC), High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDR), Super-Resolution
(SR), Noise Reduction (NR), Dynamic Contrast Improvement (DCI), Auto Color
Management (ACM) and Local Dimming (LD). Also on board is the HiSilicon Hi1103
chipset, which 2.4GHz, 5Hz dual-band and 160MHz bandwidth support for peek
download rates up to 1.7Gbps. A lot more than what you would typically find on
a smart TV.
Another thing you don't see on a TV often is an
integrated, Smart Pop-up AI Camera. It is present on the Honor Vision Pro and
primarily intended for convenient video calls. However, in another
smartphone-like move, there is a dedicated HiSilicon Hi3516DV300 NPU chipset
connected to said camera enabling all sorts of Ai capabilities, including face
recognition, body tracking and posture detection.
All this would, however, go to waste if the Honor
Vision operated on some closed proprietary software platform. Instead it is the
first actual hardware ambassador for Huawei's own Harmony OS, just officially
unveiled yesterday. There's quite a lot to the OS, but it mostly boils down to
flexibility. Huawei is betting big on the future of Harmony OS on all sorts of
devices, ranging from smartphones to smart wearables, TVs, tablets, laptops and
even cars. With a wide support for programming languages including C/, C++,
Java, JavaScript and Kotlin, the OS is very versatile and could, potentially
even be adapted with full Android app compatibility fairly quickly. As per
Huawei's own account. For the time being, however, it has its first permanent
home on the Honor Vision TV, which should act as a nice jumping point for
development without causing too much commotion in the smartphone world. That
task could fall on the Mate 30 Lite pretty soon though. But, we digress.
Back to the Honor Vision. Out of the box it does
come with a few interesting features running on Harmony OS. HiLink - Huawei's
open smart home and IoT ecosystem is baked right into it, meaning the Vision
can act like a hub for all your smart home needs. The Vision TV set is also an
entertainment center offering seamless connectivity to your smartphone or
tablet. This includes sharing files and multimedia, inputting text and
controlling the TV remotely, as well as seamlessly switching between DLNA mode
and Miracast display streaming with an advertised latency as low as 100ms. That
makes it potentially good enough for some casual gaming. All this easily
negotiable via a single NFC tag. Well, at least it's advertised that way.
The Honor Vision and Honor Vision Pro are officially
up for sale on vmall at the source link starting today for the regular Honor
Vision and August 15 for the Pro. The vanilla goes for CNY 3,799, while the Pro
will set you back CNY 4,799. The difference between the two being the smart
retractable camera on the Pro, six 10W speakers, instead of four and different
internal storage - 16GB and 32GB respectively. Orders come with a 30 day return
policy and even free on-site installation.
