Huawei was working on a new operating system after Trump administration enforced a ban on Huawei and Google announced to ceased its support of Android for the company's smartphones. And now, Huawei has officially announced HarmonyOS, the OS that is supposed to replace its reliance on Android. In China, the software is referred to as Hongmeng. The company says that the OS is based on a microkernel distributed OS, and can be used in everything from smartphones to in-vehicle systems. This will create a shared ecosystem across devices. The OS will be released as an open-source platform to encourage developers to work on it.

Since the US ban on Huawei back in May, the Chinese Govt. has shown its full support to the company and company announced that it is going to work on its own OS, but so far, we aren't sure about its reliability and global acceptance. Huawei plans to launch the new OS on a smartphone first before expanding it to other devices like wearables over the next three years. The first devices that will be getting HarmonyOS are expected to be unveiled on Saturday. The focus of this os is the Chinese market at first before Huawei expands it to other markets.

n a statement, the CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, Richard Yu, says that HarmonyOS is "completely different from Android and iOS" because of its ability to scale across different kinds of devices. "You can develop your apps once, then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices," the CEO says. Although the OS has the ability to power more devices, in a follow-up press release, Huawei said that for the time being, they are going to use it only on the upcoming smartphones. It will continue using Android on its existing phones. Whether it can continue to do so is another matter. In a press conference following the launch, Yu said that the situation was "unclear" as to whether Huawei can still use Android, and that the company is "waiting on an update" to find out.

OLED TVs have been the best in terms of providing inky black levels and infinite contrast for as long as they had been in existence, and while Samsung still markets their QLED TVs as a better alternative, the truth is that QLED are just LED TVs with a Quantum Dot filter that produces better colors. The only QLED TV that has been truly able to give OLEDs from LG and Sony a run for their money so far is the2018 Samsung Q9FN with Full Array Local Dimming and about 2000 nits of brightness! Nonetheless, OLED still does provide better picture quality in dark rooms because it is an emissive technology, which means that each pixel in an OLED TV can change color or switch off completely to eliminate blooming and create unmatched black levels.

Unfortunately, OLEDs come with a few vital shortcomings as well, reminiscent of the plasma TVs from about a decade ago. Static images can and will burn in if they are constantly there for long stretches of time, although those are extreme use scenarios. Sadly enough, this also forces manufacturers to use an automatic brightness limiter (ABL) to preserve the limited lives of the OLED pixels. However, Samsung may have a solution for this in the microLED technology that they have been showing off for the last two years at the CES.

MicroLED displays are capable of going as bright as any LED TV, they do not have the burn-in factor to worry about like we have to on OLED displays and they last a lot longer than the OLEDs. As there are roughly 3 LED lights (red, green and blue) catering to each pixel of a 4K microLED TV, you can rest assured that inky blacks and infinite contrast is perfectly within microLED's reach. The only problem is that in order to buy one that's reasonably priced, the technology will still need to be developed a lot over the course of the next few years. You can still buy the 146-inch The Wall MicroLED TV from Samsung, but keep in mind that it's so expensive that Samsung did not even make its price public! It's actually easier to make big screen microLED displays, but the real tough job is to shrink the screen size down to something that one can use in their home. Nonetheless Apple is interested in microLED, so a few years down the line, don't be surprised if the iPhone has a microLED display!

Saikat Kar