Honor Vision with HarmonyOS: What is it and Should You be Excited?

At the Huawei Developer Conference held on August 10, sister brand Honor announced the Honor Vision which is essentially a large-screen television with some smart features and of course, a pop-up camera because, hey, that’s what’s trending! The Honor Vision is gaining popularity also because it ships with the company’s latest OS which had been rumored for a long time, HarmonyOS. While it was initially rumored to be a replacement for Android on smartphones since Google was prohibited from continuing trade with Huawei, the brand made it clear that HarmonyOS was developed mainly for smart IoT devices to build an ecosystem. The Honor Vision is the first to be a part of that ecosystem.

What exactly is Honor Vision?

Well, it’s basically a smart TV with some cool AI features and dedicated chipsets for display and network. It’s a 55-inch 4K UHD HDR panel with almost no bezels and 400-nits brightness. Honor claims a screen-to-body ratio of up to 94% and 87% NTSC color gamut. Apart from the superior looks, the Honor Vision boasts of a flagship-level trio of chipsets dedicated for display, camera, and Wi-Fi performance. Let’s see what each of them do.

Honghu 818 Intelligent Display Chipset

This octa-core chipset includes MEMC processing, HDR imaging, Super Resolution, Noise Reduction, and Dynamic Contrast Improvement algorithms. All of this put together results in better image quality with regards to contrast, saturation, and sharpness.

Also, since the Honor Vision is being portrayed as something more than just a TV, the Honghu 818 allows for multiple tasks to run simultaneously on the TV.

AI Camera NPU Chipset

As we mentioned earlier, the Honor Vision (Pro variant) has a feature that’s gaining a lot of popularity on smartphones of late – A pop-up camera! If you’re wondering why a TV needs a camera, it’s because the Honor Vision has face recognition capabilities and can even track body movements and postures. Quite innovative for a TV, but not sure how practical it is.

Other notable features of Honor Vision include 6*10W HuaweiHisten speakers, local dimming, 1080p video calls and smart voice interactions with 6-array microphones.

Flagship-level Wi-Fi Chipset

The Honor Vision has the world’s first chipset to support a 160MHz bandwidth with download speeds of up to 1.7GHz. This is very important while streaming videos or movies, especially at a high resolution like 4K. Also, this is one of the few TVs to support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands. In addition, it supports Bluetooth 5.0 and Hi-Res Wireless Audio.

What all can you do on the Honor Vision?

1. Apart from the obvious functionality of a Television where you can consume your favorite content, it is also a Home Entertainment Centre which means you get a library of various shows and movies from several content providers all in one place.
2. With the Information Sharing Centre on board, the Honor Vision can share and display content to and from your smartphone, which means you can transfer photos wirelessly from your smartphone’s camera roll to view them on a large display.
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3. Since the Honor Vision is a part of the smart home ecosystem, it can also be used to control other devices like smart speakers that are a part of the connected system. Honor uses their self-developed HiLink service for doing this. Since HarmonyOS is open-sourced, this feature will also be available on other smart home devices which are not developed by Huawei/Honor.
4. Multi-Device Interaction Centre: The whole idea behind HarmonyOS is to develop a cross-platform service which is seamless and lets you switch between devices in an easy manner. With the Honor Vision, all your devices can stay connected and in sync, which means you can search for a program on your smartphone and play it on the Honor Vision. You can even project your phone’s screen. This also means you can play games on your smartphone and view the display on the big screen of the Honor Vision.
5. With Honor Magic Link, you can use your phone like a touchpad, mobile keyboard to type on TV, phone as speakers and phone as remote control.

Should you be excited about the Honor Vision?

The Honor Vision isn’t just your conventional Smart TV. Apart from the usual smart services like a library of available shows, ability to cast your phone’s screen and installing streaming apps and services, the Honor Vision opens doors for plenty of smart possibilities since it is a connected device. You can control multiple devices at home, transfer files to and from your TV and view the status of all your connected device on the big screen. The future is all about IoT and the Honor Vision is heading in exactly that direction.

The Honor Vision will be sold in two variants – A standard 2+16GB variant for RMB 3,799 (Rs. 38,000/$540) and a 2+32GB Pro version priced at RMB 4,799 (Rs. 48,000/$680). The Honor Vision has been launched in China as of now and while there is no word about availability in India, we hope Honor launches it in India as it would compete well against the affordable smart TVs from Xiaomi, TCL, Vu, and others.