Huawei's in-house Harmony OS and all its
cross-platform prowess and "Android alternative" perceived reputation
will be coming to Europe. Just not on a phone. In fact, Vincent Pang, Huawei
Senior VP already made it pretty clear that Harmony OS won't be coming to a
smartphone this year at all. So, TV's and potentially smart wearables running
the platform is all we can hope for in the immediate future. Remember, Harmony
OS is a huge and timely undertaking. Plus, one that will arguably fair better
in the current tech climate if it lays low for a bit, so to say.
Still, beyond Harmony OS itself and the various
smartphone prospects it may or may not hold, there is the Honor Vision smart TV
itself to look forward to on The Old Continent - a pretty impressive piece of
kit. More important still, a potential trendsetter for a new wave of
increasingly more "smartphone-like" TV's as feature-rich hubs for a
connected home.
As a quick reminder, the Honor Vision TV comes in a
vanilla and a Pro flavour. 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. Both feature 4K Quantum Dot
(VA) panels, courtesy of Samsung. Initially, European markets will be able to
choose between a 65-inch and a 75-inch variant, with 55-inch and 85-inch ones
coming later.
At the heart of the Honor Vision TV lies an
octa-core Honghu 818, with some smartphone-level performance figures to boast,
as well as advanced image processing technologies including 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.
The Vision TV even gets a dedicated HiSilicon
Hi3516DV300 NPU for its built-in camera, enabling some interesting Ai capture
features, mostly to be leveraged for video calls. Thanks to Harmony OS and
HiLink, the Vision TV can also act as a central hub for your IoT connected
home.
There is no real info on pricing or a time frame for
Europe availability yet. It also remains to be seen whether both the Pro and
the regular models will be entering the market. Perhaps more important still
from a service standpoint, Huawei or rather Honor, in this case, needs to
clarify its plans and intentions and potentially capabilities for various
Western-friendly service integrations into Harmony OS. In the wake of the whole
US and Google fiasco, software services really can't be taken for granted.
