Huawei just announced a lot of tech: wireless earbuds; monitors; smartwatches; tablets. While many expected the Chinese firm to finally launch its new flagship smartphone for 2021 at its June event, instead, we got everything else. Everything else might sound like Huawei admitting defeat on the phone front, but in this case, everything else seems more like Huawei fighting battles it can actually win outside China, and with its answer to Android no less – meet HarmonyOS 2.0.
Originally named Hongmeng, HarmonyOS version zero was announced in August 2019 by a defiant Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer business group. Yu made big promises of cross-device integration, from TVs to wearables, smartphones to smartglasses. According to Yu, HarmonyOS was ready to be rolled out over the air to Android devices – and it was perfect timing. After all, the Google ban was just kicking in, and the company’s latest flagship phone, the Mate 30 Pro, was a casualty of that fact.
While HarmonyOS was launched on the Huawei Vision smart TV at the same event, the reality back in 2019 was that a consumer-ready phone version of the operating system was nowhere near ready.
Fast forward to January 2021, and a new beta of HarmonyOS for smartphones was made available in China. Unveiled to select testers, it was all but identical to Huawei’s Android interface, EMUI. Panned for being a forked version of Android with nothing new, faith in Huawei’s ability to weather the no-Google storm was at an all-time low by this point. Its devices still offered no Google Calendar integration with the system calendar, there was no support for apps that require Google Services like HBO Max, or WhatsApp backup support.
By March, the foldable Mate X2 launched. Running Android, not HarmonyOS, and availability exclusively limited to China. By this point, many felt it was time to write Harmony (and global Huawei phones) off in general. After all, sales of Huawei smartphones were way down by 2021, with just 15 million smartphones shipped in Q1, compared to 66.8 million in Q3 2019 according to Counterpoint. Almost two years since it was first announced, however, HarmonyOS is finally ready for prime time. With not a smartphone in sight, though, Huawei is debuting its Android replacement OS on smartwatches and tablets.
Why isn’t HarmonyOS launching on phones you ask? Well, Android as a tablet OS is much worse than iPad OS. The Android operating system isn’t designed for a big-screen touch interface after all. Even good Android tablets like the Galaxy Tab S7 feel like blown-up smartphones with a few welcome enhancements like pen support.
As for WearOS, Google’s wearable tech operating system, while the platform delivers a fit-for-purpose UI, it’s become known for devices with terrible battery life. Some options like the Oppo Watch offer dual modes, with a basic power-saving feature, but that’s a hack on Oppo’s part, and the low-power functionality is a glorified sleep tracker.
And so, it does make some sense for Huawei to fix glaring holes in the competition with its debut of HarmonyOS 2.0, while it develops its take on smartphones, which are actually pretty great.
Starting with tablets, Huawei announced three of them: the MatePad 11, MatePad Pro 10.8, and MatePad Pro 12.6. All three share the same interface and look instantly familiar (to iPad users) when you fire them up.
At the bottom of the MatePad UI sits a shortcut tray, with a recent apps section on the right side, and docked apps o the left, virtually identical to Apple’s slate. Swipe down from the top right, and there’s a Control Centre (Apple’s naming), while a swipe down further left brings down notifications. Huawei’s Assistant screen is also Apple-inspired, with dynamic widgets displaying battery info and an editable grid, versus Google’s single-purpose news feed.
Huawei hasn’t just taken inspiration from Apple for its tablet version of HarmonyOS. It’s also nabbed some Windows 10 flourishes. For example, hover the tablet’s M Pen over an icon in the tray, and a preview window showing all instances of the app pop up. This means, as with a PC, you can work across multiple windows of the same app (if the feature’s supported). The MatePads also allow working across floating windows, in addition to split-screen multitasking. That means you can use up to four apps on-screen at once.
There are also a host of elements exclusive to HarmonyOS, with the most notable being projection modes. The MatePads can act as second screens for Windows 10 computers, offering similar functionality to Sidecar on an iPad matched with MacOS Catalina.
Either mirroring your Windows display or extending it, combined with Huawei’s M Pen, the feature turns a HarmonyOS tablet into a Wacom Cintiq-esque graphic design tool, complete with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity.
What makes the MatePads even better, especially the largest 12.6-inch version, is that tablets are less reliant on apps than phones. With such big displays, they can run like browser-based ChromeOS devices. We were having Google Meet calls, editing Google Docs, and uploading YouTube videos in our time with the tab through a browser, something we wouldn’t dream of doing on a phone.
Could the experience be better? Absolutely. Without the apps we still can’t edit Google Docs or download YouTube videos offline. Also, some of Huawei’s suggested news sources are questionable at best, and the hodgepodge of Huawei AppGallery and Petal search still needs refining.
Still, by cherry-picking competitor favourites, settling for a ‘good enough’ app experience, and matching it with Huawei’s product expertise, it’s created a tablet experience loaded with promise. Much the same can be said of its new HarmonyOS watch.
Power up the Huawei Watch 3, which has an Apple-tastic rotating crown, and its big, bold, Samsung Galaxy Watch-a-like round screen with curved sides shines brightly. It looks very good.
The Huawei Watch 3, runs HarmonyOS, a true smartwatch operating system. As such, its battery life matches the 48-72 hour competition offered by the Apple, Oppo and Samsung shaped competition. Over the last couple of years though, Huawei has been perfecting its HarmonyOS for Watch secret weapon on its Watch GT series – LiteOS.
LiteOS is the brand’s low-power operating system, and with it, the Watch GT 2 Pro delivered features like tracking for over 100 workouts, SpO2 monitoring, health syncing and basic notification support, matched with up to 21-day battery life. While LiteOS isn’t a smartwatch operating system – you can’t install third-party apps on it; it’s still incredibly fully-featured given what it can do. Handy really, given the latest incarnation of LiteOS is the Huawei Watch 3 (and Harmony OS’s) power-saving mode. The result is in effect two fully-featured watches in one.
Does the Huawei Watch 3 offer a wealth of apps? Absolutely not. Do mobile payments work on it in the UK? Nope. Does it support popular apps like Spotify? Sadly, no. In turn, this is very much early days, and competing devices still outperform Huawei’s HarmonyOS debut smartwatch.
Smartphones will be a much bigger challenge. Taking a step away from tablets and watches, and casting our minds to the mobile operating system graveyard, resting place of BlackBerry OS, Symbian, WebOS and Windows Phone to name a few – none were able to become a viable third system alongside Android and iOS. Why should HarmonyOS really be any different? Of course, it may not be. One thing is for sure though: Huawei has previous form, in hardware at least. Huawei’s phones went from questionable and out of touch in 2013 with the Ascend P6, to unquestionably excellent in 2019. Now, its fingers are in more pies than ever before – audio equipment to laptops monitors and more, its revenue streams are diverse, and its reliance on smartphones lower than ever.
So, by investing in HarmonyOS, the bow that ties Huawei’s product lines together, with its proven marathon mentality and laser focus, the once forlorn enemy of the States may have finally broken the shackles of both Google, and the Google ban once and for all.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
