Less than a week ago, Huawei announced an initiative to recruit volunteers to test the public beta of EMUI 9.1 update for eight devices – including some of the Honor branded phones as well. The complete list, along with the base software version requirements, can be found below:
As a matter of interest, all of the above phones were based on Kirin 960 platform. HiSilicon, a subsidiary of Huawei, announced this SoC in 2016. It was one of the flagship grade silicon back then, and it’s nice to see the Chinese OEM updating their legacy phones to Android Pie based EMUI 9.1.
After announcing about the beta recruitment, Huawei was quick enough to roll out the first beta build for Honor 9 (codename: STF), Honor V9 (codename: DUK) and Honor nova 2s (codename: HWI). The software version is 9.1.0.18 in these new builds.
Those who are on latest stable 9.0.1.179 build, the beta build brings plenty of new features for them. Honor 9/V9 and nova 2s owners can now use brand new GPU Turbo 3.0 (a fancy marketing name of on-demand GPU overclocking) as well as the intelligent voice assistant.
The complete changelog is as follows (translated from Chinese using Google Translate):
[Smart Video]
Intelligent extraction of essence clips, automatic matching of special effects templates, making more exciting MVs[Voice Assistant]
Smarter voice assistant, wake up by voice, self-timer, slow-motion video, calorie recognition, encyclopedia Knowledge, scan code, search and more functions[GPU Turbo 3.0]
Huawei GPU Turbo 3.0 graphics processing acceleration technology has added support for dozens of games, bringing more experience to more games[PC connection]
mobile phone and Huawei Matebook after the connection between the device clip, record screen sharing and other activities can continue to achieve[set] streamline
streamline some redundancy, complicated settings, to provide you with more concise, easy to understand, easy-to-set pay protection Center App settings moved security and privacy> payment protection center
yellow pages data, no attribution, business card templates automatically update the data set merged into automatic update settings
The complete version number of this new build is 9.1.0.188 for Honor 9 and Honor V9, while it is 9.1.0.186 for Huawei nova 2s. The P10 and Mate 9 family also got similar updates beforehand, and unsurprisingly the changelogs were virtually identical.
In case you need to revert back to stable EMUI from the beta version, follow this guide. It is worth mentioning that the revert job needs to completely wipe your phone, so take backup of your personal data before attempting to roll back.
As always, the beta builds should be far from perfect. If you spot any kind of bug/glitch, don’t forget to report it to Huawei – either via Beta Club app or by posting necessary details to the aforementioned beta announcement threads.
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