Image credit: Huawei
Huawei has announced Harmony OS, its alternative to the Android mobile operating system, will be launched next week.
The Chinese tech giant has confirmed that Harmony will be officially launched during a livestream event held on 2 June 2 at 8PM local time.
A teaser video from Huawei was posted on YouTube, and showed the HarmonyOS’ boot screen which displayed “Huawei” before showing the “HarmonyOS” logo.
The video then announced the launch next week, where it is expected that Huawei will also show off the Huawei MatePad2, which is reportedly the first device to arrive HarmonyOS pre-installed.
In September 2020, Huawei CEO Richard Yu had introduced the second version of HarmonyOS at the annual Huawei Developer Conference in Shenzhen, China.
A smartphone version of the SDK followed in December 2020, and Yu hinted last year that phones running HarmonyOS might appear next year (i.e. 2021).
And this now appears to be confirmed with the launch event next week.
It should be remembered that Huawei has previously expressed that it aims to have 300 million devices running HarmonyOS by the end of this year.
The first iteration of HarmonyOS had arrived in 2019 and was primarily designed for ‘industrial use.’
The first device to actually use the Harmony OS, which is known as Hongmeng in China, was a television bearing the Honor brand.
Huawei hopes that Harmony will be deployed smartphones, TVs, smartwatches, and in-car systems.
Harmony OS 2.0 delivers smarter voice recognition, an ‘adaptive’ user interface, security improvements, faster cross-device data transfers, and improved multi-screen functionality.
Harmony will be an important offer for Huawei, as it seeks to safeguard its smartphone position in light of severe US restrictions.
In October 2019, a workaround that allowed its users of the Huawei Mate 30 smartphone to download Google apps, was cut off.
Prior to that in August 2019, Huawei users had been warned that its flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, would not be launched with Google apps such as YouTube, GMail or Google Maps.
In November last year, Honor, the Western-focused smartphone brand from Huawei, was sold off for $15 billion to a number of China buyers.
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