At the Huawei Develop Conference 2020 event earlier today (September 10, 2020), the company officially announced HarmonyOS 2.0 (or HongMeng OS in China), an updated version of Huawei's operating system. own operating system.
During the event, Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei's Consumer Software Division, said that the company has already partnered with various leading manufacturers in China to release smart home products with the latest OS. Partners include Midea, Joyoung and Hangzhou Robam. A Huawei spokesman also said the new smart products will be much more interactive and extremely easy to use thanks to the new OS.
As an example, the senior executive mentioned a microwave oven, which he says can be connected to a smartphone with a single tap. From there, users can search for recipes on the Internet and exchange information between both devices to aid in cooking. In other words, seamless cross-platform support between smartphones and IoT (Internet of Things) products. Notably, Harmony OS is also being developed for future Huawei smartphones and is apparently 80 percent Android OS tier and could be deployed to devices if further US sanctions ban Android entirely.
Harmony OS 2.0 is the first distributed operating system that's truly built with cross-platform support in mind, according to Huawei. Through pairing between devices, it is possible to essentially interact across multiple screens, have fast network distribution, responsive user interface and more responsive voice interaction, and through AI assistants in smart speakers. The beta version of Harmony OS 2.0 will launch today for large screens, smartwatches and cars, with the smartphone iteration launching in December 2020 with full support in 2021.
