Huawei reportedly to upgrade its smartphones with HarmonyOS soon
Global Times
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Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's Consumer Business Group, unveils the HarmonyOS, or Hongmeng in Chinese, during the Huawei Developer Conference held in Dongguan, south China's Guangdong Province, Aug. 9, 2019. (Photo: Xinhua)

The Beta version of Huawei's HarmonyOS for smartphones will adopt a new "language" from December 16 onwards that will allow the phones to interact with other devices, a source briefed on the matter told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The Mate40 series will be upgraded with the self-developed operating system first, they added.

More than 90 percent of Huawei's mobile devices currently on the market will be upgraded in the future, the source said. The upgrade will provide a boost to the internet-of-things once Huawei's mobile phones and other electronic products are operating under the same language structure, and therefore communicate with each other.

Smart TV screen products installed with HarmonyOS are already available in the market. The upcoming changes to Huawei's mobile phones will make it much easier to connect and interact with other devices running on the same Harmony operating system.

Meanwhile, Huawei has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing the HarmonyOS ecosystem, which now reach 70-80 percent of the performance features of Android OS. The new system is improving nearly every day, said Richard Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer businesses, according to domestic news site finance.sina.com.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, applauded the reported software upgrade, which he described as another important step for building a complete Huawei ecosystem developed entirely by a Chinese tech company.

"Because it's a self-developed operating system by Huawei, HarmonyOS avoids any risk of Google taking away its authorization for Huawei to continue using Android in the future," explained Xiang. "Meanwhile, HarmonyOS, with its newly-designed language, can be regarded as an advanced operating system to replace Android, and also the foundation for Huawei to build the internet of things, which will greatly enhance the interaction capability between electronic devices."