The Honor Vision smart TV is now official and the first device to run Harmony OS
VICTOR, 10 AUGUST 2019
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.
Honor Vision 55-inch 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.
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