Smartphones, laptops and tablets come in many shapes, sizes and prices, but they can’t always talk easily to one another. Technology such as Apple’s AirDrop is great, but you can’t easily send files quickly between iPhones and Android phones, and even various Android phones have their own proprietary ways of communicating with each other, forcing consumers to find lengthy workarounds.
It seems as though Honor, the Chinese Android firm, wants to change this. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona, Honor announced a grand vision it calls the ‘Honor Alpha Plan’, an initiative it says could help link tech companies’ devices and technologies together.
Part of this plan includes “the world’s first all-ecosystem file-sharing technology” that Honor says offers “ultra-fast speeds, whether transferring files to one or many iOS and Android devices”, potentially fixing a common file transfer pain point.
Honor said the tech can send 1GB of data from an Honor phone to an iPhone in 13 seconds, with the option to send appearing in Android’s default share options when you go to send a file. There will also be options to send to other specific Android branded devices such as Oppo, but the tech doesn’t appear to be able to work both ways, so your iPhone-owning friends won’t be able to send files as easily to your Android phone.
Honor said in a press release that it “calls on the industry to co-create an open, value-sharing ecosystem that maximises human potential, ultimately benefiting all mankind”.
Heady stuff indeed.
“I am calling on all of us to unite together to address the challenges – as well as the many opportunities – of AI technology,” said James Li, CEO of Honor. “I also call on the industry to be truly open so that we can fully embrace this exciting AI future. Let’s do it together.”
Honor says this plan is a “global vision” and includes working on what it calls an “intelligent phone” that could include the firm’s new AI software that aims to make AI more useful for people.
It showed off a demo where the software helped to make a restaurant reservation using a third-party app from a voice prompt. The system could look at the user’s calendar and the live traffic information to give all the needed details on timings and find an appropriate location. Honor said it was using Google’s Gemini Ai behind the scenes to get this done, along with Qualcomm tech.
This advanced use of AI is what Honor hopes the whole industry can work together to achieve on more devices. Right now, AI on phones is usually limited to one company’s services. For example, while Apple Intelligence, Apple’s AI tools, can make summaries of notifications from any app, some of its other features only work in Apple’s own apps such as Mail, Messages and Calendar, and not in Gmail or Google Maps.
Honor said it plans to bring its new AI technology to “its devices in international markets in the near future” and called on partners and rival tech companies to bring AI to more types of devices aside from smartphones.
It claimed it will invest $10 billion over the next five years to fund the push for this open ecosystem.
“Collaboration is the fabric that weaves together the open ecosystem for AI. We’re thrilled to join hands with Honor and other industry partners to ride this disruptive wave. We are working closely to deeply integrate Google’s Gemini AI models into Honor solutions, and create new possibilities for users around the world that were never before possible, while protecting their data security and user privacy,” said Matt Waldbusser, Managing Director, Global Solutions and Consumer AI, Google Cloud.
Alongside this, Honor also unveils its AiMAGE tech that it said can use AI in the cloud and on devices to cook up new ways to edit and generate images, including in a feature called AI Upscale that can improve image quality, which will come to the Honor Magic 7 Pro phone from March in a software update.
Honor also said it will bring artificial intelligence (AI) powered deepfake detection to its Magic 7 Pro phone and foldable phones such as the Magic V3.
