Huawei plans to launch a new all-screen smartphone with under display selfie camera in Paris on October 17. According to a Tencent report, the device may be Huawei's first phone running Harmony OS.
The details of the launch came from Jeb Su, VP of Advanced Technologies at Atherton Research. But it only became widely known in China after dozens of local media outlets pushed notifications about this event through the Apps.
The image tweeted by Su shows a device with almost no bezels and a front dominated entirely by the screen. Chinese smartphone makers have been working on a truly bezel-less smartphone for some time now.
Huawei is no stranger to bringing new technology to the market ahead of its rivals. But launching a smartphone with true edge-to-edge display and selfie camera under the screen will be a big accomplishment, a recent report from BGR noted.
The technology was not expected to be ready at least until early 2020. The details about the device remain scant at this moment and there haven't been any leaks just yet, the report said.
Apart from those intriguing specs however, Chinese media were focusing on the expectation that the upcoming device would run Huawei's Harmony OS.
The Tencent report said Huawei has been testing smartphones running the self-made OS and "if Huawei did launch the device, don't be surprised."
Huawei unveiled the Harmony OS in August at the "Huawei Developer Conference 2019," where the company gave a Chinese-language presentation on HarmonyOS, giving a vague overview with no screenshots or demos.
Harmony OS isn‘t quite targeting smartphones yet, and the OS first debuted on the "Honor Smart Screen" and Huawei TVs released in September.
Huawei said an expansion to smartphones could happen sometime over the next three years, but for now, it wants to stick with Android.
As for what Harmony OS actually is, the company described it as "a microkernel-based OS, distributed OS for all scenarios." Huawei says the OS will run across a range of form factors, and the company even pulled out the old "write once, run everywhere" claim for app developers.
Huawei spent some time the competition, saying Android‘s Linux kernel uses a resource scheduling model "targeting server load" and lacks UI smoothness as a result. In contrast, Huawei promised Harmony would have a faster and more responsive UI.
HarmonyOS will be open source, so hopefully we will see some third-party code reviews once the repo is posted.
