Rumor: midrange smartphone with Huawei HongMeng OS coming this fall

The first phone with HongMeng OS from Huawei will be released this fall and is a midrange model, a Chinese newspaper writes. Huawei may want to show the operating system at its own developer conference this week.

The phone is said to have a price of around 2000 yuan, currently around 260 euros. The release aims to get users and developers into HongMeng’s ecosystem, Global Times reports. Huawei would like to have millions of copies of the phone produced.

Huawei would like to show its own operating system later this week, at its own developer conference in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. It will focus on the capacity for IoT applications and industrial equipment. The first devices with HongMeng would be TVs from subsidiary brand Honor.

The Chinese manufacturer uses a microkernel instead of the Linux kernel in Android phones. It does not see HongMeng as a replacement for Android for the time being, but if the manufacturer is no longer allowed to use Android, it will be able to use HongMeng as an alternative.

Huawei became part of a trade ban imposed by the US government in May. Companies were no longer allowed to trade with the Chinese manufacturer. That also included Google, and that would cause problems for the use of Android on the phones. Since then, there have been many rumors about how the company may want to get rid of Android, but it is still far from certain how exactly that should go. The trade ban has since been partially suspended.

Screenshots of HongMeng from patent application