We had the chance to test HarmonyOS in the most unusual places: the first machine co-developed by Huawei, the AITO M5, which was reviewed by our sister site ArenaEV.com. It’s great to see automakers leverage smartphone companies and their expertise in building smooth, smooth operating systems.
Huawei went further and made sure their HarmonyOS was first showcased in a car they developed together. In the center console is the giant 15.6-inch infotainment system running on the HarmonyOS. Huawei calls the screen 2k, the actual resolution is 1,920×1,080px, and the panel is HDR with a 90% screen-to-body ratio.
Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 990A
- PROCESSOR:4 Taishan V20 Lite (large core), 4 Cortex-A55
- GPU:8 Mali-G76
- AI / NPU:2 Ascend Da Vinci D110 Tiny, 1 Ascend Da Vinci D100 Lite
- Various: Support for 5G network connection; Computing power: 3.5 TOP
The 990A is different from the Kirin 990 chip from a consumer electronics standpoint, the Kirin 990A has essential changes in the CPU performance core, the number of GPU cores is halved, and the NPU has also undergone some changes in the number of CPUs. core. However, since the two chips are not used for the same platforms (one for cars, one for portable electronics) there is no way to directly compare their performance.
Reports indicate that Huawei is considering turning the chip into a small pluggable card, similar in size to a laptop RAM stick, which allows you to upgrade your hardware. That’s good news, considering cars have a much longer lifespan than the chips that power their infotainment systems.
We will start by listing the main differences between Android Auto, Apple Carplay and HarmonyOS:
1. Through screen projection, a rich ecosystem of apps is immediately available. Most of the apps installed on the mobile phone can be used in the car and it is not a problem to play large mobile games.
Getting around HarmonyOS
2. Video phone calls can be seamlessly transferred to the car when you get in, and the car call can use the car camera, microphone and speaker. Two cars with HarmonyOS can even make video calls.
3. The voice assistant has the ability to recognize the voice separation area and can control almost all of the car hardware including windows and air conditioners. In addition, she also has advanced functions such as continuous dialogue and the visible to speak.
HarmonyOS
Using HarmonyOS in the car is a node where Huawei can show off one of the best and most practical applications of the IoT (Internet of Things). Huawei has a large catalog of smart home products, ranging from smart cameras, smart door locks / doorbells, TVs, etc. So, after logging into your Huawei account, the same products on the account can also be controlled via the car, with voice command or other. “Turn on the living room camera”, “Turn off the TV”, “Video call the living room TV” (yes, that’s right! Huawei has a TV with a camera on top that allows you to video call directly on it!), All of this can be achieved through the infotainment system.
The settings menu
After using HarmonyOS for a while, we can say that the system works incredibly well, the whole system is very customizable and Huawei has definitely made it smart. The camera on the driver’s side can recognize faces and automatically change themes / home screens for the driver when he gets into the car.
Whether paired with Huawei phones, smartwatches, or pretty much anything else in the Huawei ecosphere, everything is connected together really smoothly – do you want to go somewhere and have the location on your phone? Send it to the car and it will open the maps app for you.
Most things are intuitive, for example, the controls most used by the driver will be on the left side, making it easier to access and almost anyone who uses a phone will be able to use this infotainment without much difficulty. However, being too much like a phone / tablet experience, it made us swipe up from the bottom to go back to the home page a few times, instead of clicking the Home button in the lower left corner as required.
Control panel and home screen
The home screen has what Huawei calls a “Smart Dock”, similar to the app dock on the phone. You can change and edit the apps to be placed on the bottom row. There are also widget-style apps such as weather, music and news, which will show you the latest updates on the weather, news and music playing in real time. This splash screen is also what makes the system so easy to detect as it is just like your phone.
Smart dock, assistant, home screen
The app store is Huawei’s AppGallery, but apps must first be given the green light to be “car-friendly”. So the plethora of apps you can normally download to your Huawei phone has been reduced significantly, but there is still a huge number remaining by car infotainment standards. User experience is key here, if you prefer a certain music app or browsing app, download it and set it as default. Even decent infotainment systems like Tesla’s system can’t match HarmonyOS in terms of customization.
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One important thing to note is that the Maps app is also in this “Smart Dock”. It’s on the left side for quick driver access, but it’s even less prominent than most other cars where “maps / navigation” is normally a standalone selection or is the home page itself.
Does this affect the driver’s ability to use the infotainment? No. When you use the Maps app for navigation and want to open another app, a split screen will open where the navigation will still be on the left and the open app will be on the right. This split screen ratio can also be changed to different aspect ratio and apps can be swapped on both sides.
What if you accidentally hit the home button from navigation then? In the upper left corner, a medium sized directions widget will appear indicating the next turn, travel time, etc.
In the settings apps, under the system we can see that the car runs HarmonyOS build 2.1.0.109 and, like on the phone, you can access the memory management and a lot of other system information. Many things can also be changed: Huawei Assistant allows you to customize the wake command to whatever you like and this is much better than other systems that require the use of a generic phrase “hey ___”.
Then there are the usual settings you will see in other cars. Driving allows you to change the driving profile, driving mode, auto-hold and ESC. The power shows the remaining mileage, scheduled charging times and so on. Although we have used these settings in other cars a million times, when used in the AITO M5 it looks refreshingly different: no lag, intuitive, and the user interface is also pleasant to look at.
Driving settings
However, there was one interesting setting that struck us, namely Nap mode – with three settings: nap, meditation, and breath. Sometimes when you’ve had a stressful morning at work, you just want to relax. Then step into your HarmonyOS-equipped AITO M5 and press Nap mode – the car plays the sweet sounds of birds and water, and the driver’s seat reclines to an almost horizontal position. This feature allows you to relax and be immersed, we felt more rested after using only the 3 minute “Breathe” mode.
Now let’s talk about the voice assistant: as mentioned above, the wake up command can be changed and the assistant is able to “listen intelligently”, what it does is when you wake the assistant for the first time, you can have a continuous conversation with it and it will listen to all commands in a set time. This is something other car voice assistants can do as well.
What sets it apart is the recognition rate, speed, and what you can do with the voice assistant. The voice assistant can control everything on the screen, “swipe down” on settings, say “display”, “HUD brightness set to 0” and “set to 100%”. Voice commands are instant and there is no need to reactivate the assistant.
The way it handles context is also amazing, after setting the HUD brightness to 0 and then saying “set to 100%”, it will turn the HUD brightness to 100, knowing that’s what you meant. Even having a casual conversation with your friends will not trigger the AI, it almost magically knows that you are not talking to it and it will ignore you: the “smart listen” function is programmed to 1 minute after waking the assistant, it will listen for 1 minute after the last voice control, then go to sleep or you can cancel it at any time.
All in all, this version of HarmonyOS shows that Huawei has optimized it for in-car use and it’s nice to see so much effort put into its ease of use and not being a hassle to use while driving. While there are differences and some limitations to what can be done, the underlying settings and UI design are the same as on a Huawei phone.
HarmonyOS has been optimized to be able to use the Kirin 990A chipset to its fullest limits with completely smooth apps and other functions to use smoothly in our time with it. Already some automakers like BYD and Geely have expressed interest in adopting the operating system, so it may see a lot more in the future.
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