Honor makes smartphones, smartwatches, fitness wearables, and if you’re really keen, you can even buy Honor-branded laptops. Next month, Honor will add another product type to its name, and it’s looking increasingly likely the company will launch some kind of smart television. It has not come out and said the word yet, but it’s dropping hints about its plans through related technology announcements. Here’s what we know so far about Honor’s TV ambitions.
The end product is currently only known as Honor Vision, and it includes tech that phone fans will already be familiar with, alongside some interesting new additions to Honor’s name. The Honor Vision screen — whatever it turns out to be — will have a pop-up camera, and use Honor’s own, new Honghu 818 processor. All of this falls under a concept Honor calls Sharp Tech, which seems to include many of Honor’s other tech innovations, such as the GPU Turbo game enhancements, and the Huawei-developed dual-NPU (neural processing unit).
The Honghu 818 is a chipset designed specifically for smart screens and comes with a wide array of image processing enhancements from HDR to auto color management, plus local dimming and noise reduction. Honor told Digital Trends and other journalists at a press briefing the Honghu 818 is also designed to deliver excellent 8K image processing, regardless of screen size and type.
Honor, a dual brand with Huawei, has worked with HiSilicon on the Honghu 818, the manufacturer also responsible for the Kirin 980 chip inside the Huawei P30 Pro and the Honor 20 Pro. The synergy between HiSilicon, the Honghu 818, and Honor’s smartphone expertise becomes obvious in the addition of a pop-up camera to the Honor Vision. Part of the “smart” experience, the camera will use the 818’s NPU for face recognition, potentially enabling individual features and settings — much like the PlayStation camera does for Sony’s games console.
The pop-up camera will help negate privacy concerns about having a live camera in the living room, as it’ll be very obvious when it’s operating. Honor has just announced the Honor 9X, its first phone with a pop-up camera on board, but has experimented with alternative camera systems in the past, such as the slider mechanism on the Honor Magic 2. Additionally, Huawei’s HongMeng operating system — at first believed to be an Android alternative for smartphones — has been revealed to also be designed for many smart products, including televisions. Honor may choose to use it for the Honor Vision.
When will Honor talk more about Honor Vision? Potentially, everything will be revealed on August 10 at a panel held during Huawei’s developer conference taking place in China. For now, at least, it seems certain the Honor Vision will be a smart screen, with a high degree of tech crossover between televisions and smartphones.
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