Understand Huawei Developer Conference HarmonyOS 4 with four major upgrades!

'HarmonyOS 4 Four major upgrades explained at Huawei Developer Conference'

【phoneauto】On the afternoon of August 4th at 14:30, HDC.Together2023 Huawei Developer Conference set sail once again, officially launching the new HarmonyOS 4, bringing four major upgrades.

At the beginning of the conference, Huawei’s Executive Director, CEO of the Consumer Business Group, and CEO of the Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU, Richard Yu, took the stage. Looking back, he said that the Hongmeng ecosystem has overcome numerous challenges.

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According to market research agencies, Huawei’s high-end market share in China’s smartphone market ranks second, Huawei’s smart wearables maintain the first place in the Chinese market in terms of shipments, and the brand awareness of HarmonyOS has been increasing year by year. As of now, there are already 700 million HarmonyOS devices, and the number of HarmonyOS developers has exceeded 2.2 million. The universal card of Yuan’s service and the multi-device collaboration capability have been well-received.

With the support of the underlying capabilities of the PanGu big model, HarmonyOS brings more advanced AI, and Xiao Yi will have AI big model capabilities. However, Huawei advocates more responsible AI, and the first principle of all AI experience innovation and scenario design is security and privacy protection.

In this conference, Huawei released the new generation of short-range wireless connection technology called Star Flash (NearLink), providing a more powerful connection for the HarmonyOS Internet of Everything, creating a revolutionary experience with lower latency, lower power consumption, wider coverage, and greater security.

The new HarmonyOS 4 is the highlight of this conference. The new system has been upgraded in four aspects, including and .

Personal Expression

Your photos, moods, and even natural weather can be expressions of your personality. To meet the needs of users’ self-expression, HarmonyOS 4 brings personalized features such as personalized themes, panoramic weather wallpapers, and mood wallpapers.

Users only need to upload photos to the theme center, select the corresponding themed style, and the system can automatically complete actions such as clipping and wallpaper design, allowing ordinary photos to instantly become exquisite wallpapers. It can also automatically match AOD, wallpapers, lock screens, and provide various personalized styles such as magazine themes, texture themes, and fashion albums, allowing users to design wallpapers according to their own preferences.

The brand new panoramic weather theme brings interactive real-time weather wallpapers, incorporating the four seasons and weather into the phone, rendering more realistic weather scenes. With the gravity sensing function, the weather wallpaper can automatically switch between three different perspectives of flat view, overhead view, and upward view based on the user’s phone usage posture and screen angle.

HarmonyOS 4 also upgrades and enriches the existing Emoji system, currently supporting 12 major categories, including sports, people, animals, etc., with a total of 1840 emojis available.

Efficient gameplay

With the development and popularization of Internet technology, people receive more and more information every day. The phone notification bar is filled with a large number of ineffective information push notifications, and valuable information is easily overwhelmed. In response to this, HarmonyOS 4 has visually optimized the notification center and added the Live Window function to make key messages clearer. Users can grasp the most valuable information at the first time.

HarmonyOS 4’s notification center has a brand new visual effect, using large icons and removing small titles, making the text hierarchy clear. The new notification center abandons the traditional logic of sorting by time and classifies the importance of notifications, placing live notifications, social and communication notifications, and other important notifications at the top, while marketing and information notifications are displayed in a unified area to reduce user interference. The importance of information is clear at a glance.

In addition, Huawei’s smartwatch has added a lunar phase window, placing important information like the lunar phase on the upper right corner of the dial.

HarmonyOS 4 Super Transfer Station supports more applications, allowing users to easily extract text and images by long-pressing with two fingers and drag them to the transfer station; Super Desktop expands to more scenarios, supporting not only the transition of mobile games to smart cockpit screens, but also the transition of drone aerial footage to smart cockpit screens; the presentation annotation function allows the HUAWEI M-Pencil to transform into a whiteboard pen, enabling content to be highlighted and annotated, making presentations easier for both online and offline meetings.

New Xiaoyi

HarmonyOS 4’s new Xiaoyi, empowered by AI models, continues to enhance in three aspects: smart interaction, efficient productivity, and personalized services, becoming smarter, more capable, and more considerate.

Xiaoyi’s conversational interaction is more natural and smooth. Users no longer need to remember precise function descriptions, they can express their needs intuitively, and Xiaoyi will understand and intelligently recognize text and objects in images (such as phone numbers, addresses, websites, emails, dates, and tracking numbers), and provide further services.

The new Xiaoyi can also transform into a more efficient productivity tool, with more precise and comprehensive search capabilities. Users don’t need to accurately remember the document titles, just provide a general description of the content, and Xiaoyi can help find the corresponding documents, perform core extraction and analysis on the documents, and even assist users in quickly completing copywriting in some common scenarios.

Smooth and Secure

In terms of smoothness and security, HarmonyOS 4 is equipped with the new Huawei Ark Engine, which brings six engines for graphics, multimedia, memory, scheduling, storage, and low power consumption. It provides a smooth and silky user experience on various devices, with a 20% performance improvement and an additional 30 minutes of battery life.

HarmonyOS 4 not only provides an intelligent security monitoring engine to keep malicious entities out, but also creates a secure usage environment through application risk behavior control, ATC anti-tracking, and a secure browser in daily use.

At the same time, Huawei’s remote child protection function solves the problem of “one-to-one” device settings between parents and children’s devices. By integrating content, devices, events, entrances, and accounts, it achieves a solution of setting once, managing multiple devices and apps with one device and one account.

In addition, HarmonyOS 4 upgrades Huawei accounts and creates a lifelong digital asset management system for users. HarmonyOS 4 introduces digital asset inheritance functionality to meet the needs of managing digital legacies for both deceased and living users.

Starting today, Huawei will launch public beta upgrades for 34 products including Mate 50 series, P60 series, Mate X3, and MatePad Pro 12.6 inch. At the same time, Huawei will recruit pollen beta testers for 35 products including P40 series, Mate 30 series, nova 9, and nova 10.

HarmonyOS brings further optimized intelligent cabin experience, allowing the in-car screens to support multi-device collaboration. With just a gentle drag, the content on the cabin screen can be seamlessly transferred to the rear screen, enabling synchronized viewing for the front and rear passengers.

Super Desktop will also support more applications and provide a richer experience. For example, on the cabin’s large screen, users can open mobile games through the Super Desktop, and the combination of the large screen, HUAWEI SOUND speakers, and controllers allows mobile games to have an immersive experience similar to console gaming. Super Desktop can also access smartphone applications for drones, allowing users to watch aerial footage on the large cabin screen and enjoy a wider and more expansive scenery with family and friends while lying in the car.

Exploration never stops. Officially, HarmonyOS continues to deepen its software root technology. The Hongmeng kernel has inherent smoothness, extreme energy efficiency, and pure security. The Ark graphics engine brings high-end, delicate, and smooth graphics experience, creating a solid foundation for the Hongmeng ecosystem.

With the practical experience of developing applications around the three major concepts of HarmonyOS application development – multi-end deployment, flexible combination and separation, and unified ecosystem native intelligence – third-party partners are actively joining the development ranks. Application developers are now equipped with the conditions for rapid development of HarmonyOS applications and meta-services.

In addition, Huawei officially announced that the HarmonyOS NEXT developer preview version is now open to cooperative enterprise developers and will be open to all developers in the first quarter of 2024.

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