After experiencing several quarters of shipment growth, the global smartphone market has finally emerged from a period of downturn. This September, major brands held grand launch events, with Apple unveiling the highly anticipated iPhone 16 and Huawei introducing the Mate XT. Meanwhile, Honor showcased at the IFA in Berlin, announcing the push towards the "autonomous driving era" with the industry's first AI Agent.
The Berlin IFA coincided with its centenary celebration, which Honor greatly valued. Building on the success of the Magic V2, which topped the foldable market in Western Europe in the second quarter, Honor introduced a range of new products, including the world's first 3K OLED tablet, the MagicPad2, and the brand's first AI PC based on the Snapdragon® X Elite platform, the MagicBook Art14 Snapdragon Edition.
The newly launched Magic V3 foldable smartphone is another masterpiece from Honor following the Magic V2, with a thickness reduced from 9.9mm to 9.2mm, setting a new industry standard for thinness. It not only boasts a sleek design but also features a DSLR-grade Honor HawkEye camera and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, coupled with a 5150mAh battery, delivering outstanding performance and battery life, and earning the Best Smartphone Award from global tech site Android Authority.
However, the most striking was Honor's introduction of the HONOR AI Agent. The world's first multimodal personalized AI showcased its powerful capabilities at the event. Staff demonstrated by asking Honor's YOYO assistant about ongoing auto-renewals, with YOYO automatically checking both Alipay and WeChat for such services and presenting the results to the user, who could then choose to cancel them individually or all at once.
At first glance, this feature may seem simple, but its underlying value is comparable to the autonomous driving era in the new energy vehicle industry. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the smartphone industry has seen a surge in intelligent features, with various cool functions emerging, such as polishing user input, converting Chinese-English recordings to text, and smart photo editing, leaving consumers dazzled.
Yet, Honor believes these features are just the tip of the iceberg, with a significant gap remaining before true artificial intelligence is achieved. According to Honor's four-tier AI strategic framework, these applications only fall into the third and fourth layers. The third layer includes applications like clipping and photo rendering, while functions like question answering are manifestations of cloud AI.
Honor aims for higher-level applications: the first layer achieves cross-system, cross-device integration, and the second layer involves AI-reconstructing the terminal operating system, making the phone increasingly attuned to user needs. Simply put, the third and fourth layer functions are merely additional useful tools, while the first and second layers signify that AI can understand user intentions, automatically invoke relevant applications, and truly solve user problems.
At the exhibition, the HONOR AI Agent demonstrated this capability. When a user makes a request, it can understand the intention and translate it into specific tasks, which it then breaks down and assigns to different applications to complete, finally integrating the results and feeding them back to the user. The HONOR AI Agent is no longer just an independent application but a powerful assistant, capable of performing more tasks as it continues to learn and train.