Taking into account the multi-purpose and professional AI model, HarmonyOS NEXT that removes the Android code, and the "Folding Screen/Tablet Application Experience Evaluation Standard" that provides the adaptation direction for folding screen applications. . .
However, in addition to these things that are relatively close to our ordinary users and easy to explain clearly, Huawei also officially announced a black technology that you may not have noticed:
Starlight, a communication standard that combines "more stable WiFi" and "better Bluetooth".
According to the official introduction (Huawei Developer Conference 2023), Starlight, like HarmonyOS, focuses on an "Internet of Everything".
It specifies two protocols at the same time:
One is Starlight SLB which is somewhat similar to WiFi, but compared with WiFi, Starlight has lower latency and more stable network;
There is also a star flash SLE similar to Bluetooth, but whether it is speed, delay or signal, it completely beats traditional Bluetooth.
However, in Tony's view, how much it can outperform WiFi and Bluetooth in terms of technical parameters is not the point.
For today's chaotic wireless interconnection situation, the most important thing is "convergence".
Friends who often need to connect with various wireless devices know how fragmented the current wireless interconnection ecology is and how bad the experience is.
The receivers of wireless keyboards, mice, and wireless headsets are fully plugged into the computer; but if you abandon the receivers and replace them with Bluetooth keyboards, mice and headsets, the poor performance is basically useless.
The same is true for the interconnection between mobile phones and cars. Although theoretically there is no problem with the interconnection between the two parties; but in fact, unless the mobile phone manufacturer and the car brand have made a two-way adaptation, it will still have to return to the era of Bluetooth playback with full loss of sound quality.
For those of us who often use a bunch of devices at the same time, the interconnection and mutual transmission on various mobile phones and tablets is even more troublesome.
Cross-vendor file transfer is relatively better, and can barely be divided into four camps: the mutual transfer alliance led by Huawei, the mutual transfer alliance led by other domestic manufacturers, Nearby Share led by Google, and Apple's AirDrop.
In the camp, as long as you can endure the frequent failure to find the device and the occasional transmission failure, it is still barely usable.
The largest mutual transmission alliance in China
The Internet is another matter entirely.
The manufacturer's interconnection ecology is limited to the interior, and Huami OV has its own set. It is almost impossible to share the clipboard between Xiaomi's mobile phone and vivo's tablet.
The systems of each company are completely torn apart. If there is no "family bucket", let alone any convenient cross-device features. . .
Although in this situation, there must be the manufacturer's own Xiao Jiujiu in it.
But after experiencing a bunch of bad experiences, Tony also discovered two technical problems, which can be regarded as the reason why manufacturers cannot comply with the standards even if they want to.
One of the most important points is that there are no standards.
In terms of WiFi and Bluetooth collaboration, there is no one who can press the manufacturer's head to implement it.
From the point of view of characteristics, Bluetooth and WiFi should be complementary. If they can cooperate with each other, it would be better:
WiFi speed is fast, the connection distance is long, and the connection is more stable, but the hardware is complex, the power consumption is higher, and the operation during connection is complicated;
Although the communication distance, communication speed, and communication quality of Bluetooth are tragic, its power saving, lightweight, and simple connection features can just fill in the blind spots of WiFi.
But unfortunately, the technical standards of WiFi and Bluetooth belong to two alliances completely. When they were designed, they did not consider cooperating, let alone cooperating with each other.
The division of mutual transfer of files is a very vivid example.
In theory, mutual transmission is a very simple matter: two mobile phones simply confirm their identities through Bluetooth, then tell each other a temporary WiFi hotspot and password, and then quickly transfer files through the hotspot.
But the problem is that the WiFi Alliance and the Bluetooth Alliance have no regulations at all, which specific solution should be adopted for each step! Because there has never been such a deep cooperation between technology alliances!
So company A set up plan A, company B designed plan B, and company C came up with plan C. . .
And you can't scold it, because there is no standard in the industry. . .
Another problem is that the upper limit of Bluetooth's design was too low. Now in 2023, it can be said that nothing can be done well.
But the lower limit of WiFi is too high, and those devices that want to get out of the giant pit of Bluetooth often hit the insurmountable barrier of "WiFi lower limit".
For example, the most common demand now—wireless earphones—is a victim who happens to be stuck in the middle of the two technologies.
The battery life of wireless headphones is very important, so the power-saving Bluetooth seems to be the most suitable;
But as long as anyone who has studied the sound quality of Bluetooth knows that Bluetooth headsets are barely usable now, it is entirely the result of a bunch of tricky operations under Bluetooth.
For example, aptX LL to reduce latency and LDAC to improve sound quality.
Without the support of these proprietary protocols, the delay, sound quality and connection quality of Bluetooth headsets are completely tragic.
You can easily get audio delay of a few tenths of a second, listen to the sound quality of mp3 at most, and the signal is not good in crowded places. . .
Every point here cannot be solved by the current Bluetooth technology.
So, would wireless headphones with WiFi be a good idea?
As long as you search on Taobao, you can find that there is no such product in the conventional market.
After all, WiFi headsets are bound to face higher costs, complex to explosive connection operations, non-standard software, and higher power consumption. . .
If you are willing to spend 2,200 dollars to buy a "no-name" headset, no one should do it. . .
Similar to wireless headsets, a large number of current wireless devices, such as keyboards and mice, and car-machine interconnection, are mostly caught in the middle by the huge gap between Bluetooth and WiFi.
Bluetooth is barely usable, and the cost of switching to WiFi is too high. We can only sweep the snow through various proprietary hardware and proprietary protocols.
In Tony's view, Xingshan is aiming at these two points, trying to create a unified and feasible Internet specification.
First of all, for the cross-technical collaboration between "low-end Bluetooth" and "high-end WiFi", the Starlight Alliance adopted a method that can be said to be a miracle:
Turn both "WiFi" and "Bluetooth" into "Starlight".
As mentioned at the beginning, Starlight can be divided into two branches: SLB and SLE.
From their characteristics, SLB is "more stable WiFi", fast, but complicated;
And SLE is "better Bluetooth", slow, but simple and low power consumption.
But these two branches are not as irrelevant as WiFi and Bluetooth, they are two branches with different purposes under the same standard.
When the Starlight Alliance is coordinating the "Star Edition WiFi" and "Star Edition Bluetooth", it will definitely not appear in the previous situation of fighting each other and relying entirely on the manufacturers themselves.
SLE and SLB share a single upper-level design
So what's the use of it?
For example, to lay the foundation for the unified interconnection of cars, machines and mobile phones in the future.
Like the split of mobile phone communication, a considerable part of the current chaos in car-machine interconnection is purely technical.
Since the performance of Bluetooth cannot meet the needs of interconnection, and the WiFi connection and authentication process is too cumbersome, the most common method for vehicle-machine interconnection is also to first authenticate Bluetooth, automatically exchange WiFi connection parameters, and finally automatically switch to WiFi to complete vehicle-machine interconnection. .
But as mentioned before, the two technical organizations behind WiFi and Bluetooth did not go deep into this step of cooperation, and the whole process is completely free to define by the manufacturer.
This bunch of completely different interconnection technologies are naturally incompatible.
Now Starlight unifies "WiFi" and "Bluetooth" under one framework. Although it certainly cannot completely prevent manufacturers from deliberately incompatibility, it at least provides a technically feasible and advanced compatible standard.
As for the historical burden of Bluetooth is too heavy, the performance is too bad, and it has been a bit out of date, Xingshan also gave an answer of "rich and technology is self-willed":
Get rid of the historical burden of Bluetooth, and directly rewrite a "star version of Bluetooth".
First of all, the speed of bluetooth is not enough?
Starlight SLE, with six times the speed of Bluetooth BLE, is so fast that it can fly!
Lossless uncompressed audio is only about 4Mbps at most, and the maximum speed of Starlight SLE 12Mbps can fully meet the demand.
Then, the latency of bluetooth is too high?
That's because the Bluetooth protocol design is too old, it can send data up to 133 times per second, and the theoretical delay limit is 7.5 milliseconds;
And SLE is specially optimized for latency, it can send data up to 4000 times per second, and the theoretical latency limit is 0.25 microseconds!
And the difference between them is probably one in the sky and one in the ground.
The Bluetooth mouse has a maximum return rate of 125Hz, and even using it for office codes will make Tony feel uncomfortable.
And the mouse that adopts Starlight SLE with the highest return rate of 4000Hz can completely reach the level of a gaming mouse in terms of return rate alone.
After all, the return rate of the well-known entry-level wireless gaming mouse Logitech G304 is only 1000Hz. . .
For a more vivid analogy, imagine the difference in image lag between a 30Hz monitor and a 900 Hz monitor (which doesn't currently exist).
Lastly, is the Bluetooth connection quality bad?
Starlight SLE directly adopts Huawei's well-known polar code coding scheme on 5G, and at the same time applies various technologies accumulated by Huawei in the communication field for many years.
Everyone occasionally suspects that Huawei is bragging, but generally they don't doubt that Huawei's signal is good.
After such a combined punch, it can be said that Starlight has provided a technical route for manufacturers to get rid of private agreements, and provided a common agreement basis for cross-platform and cross-manufacturer interconnection.
Now there is only one last question left: Will manufacturers with small calculations in their hands play with Huawei?
At least for now, it should be possible.
Even if you don't look at the more than 300 member units, as long as you look at the list of directors of the Star Alliance, Tony can be sure that Star will not be unknown.
Huami OV, China Mobile, ZTE, MediaTek, Ziguang Zhanrui. . .
To be honest, it has been a long time since we have seen an alliance with such a high "content" that can achieve the full collection of the entire industry chain. . .
Finally, I would like to mention that there are still a lot of "gossip" about Xingshan, but they all have to go deep into technology, which does not fit our positioning of "reading before bed" or "wake-up news". For example, the CEO of Sound Research Technology, a member unit of Starlight, told us that the ultimate goal of Starlight is to "replace cable" in some scenarios.
At present, the biggest advantage of wired over wireless is not in speed, but in delay. Don't look at Tony's use of "more stable WiFi" and "better Bluetooth" to describe Starlight, in fact, its entire set of technologies has little to do with WiFi and Bluetooth. From the perspective of technical sources alone, Starlight should be called "personal version of 5G".
It inherits the "ultra-low latency" feature of 5G, and even does better than 5G, directly reducing the latency to a microsecond level close to wired.
Compared with WiFi in milliseconds, this is an improvement of hundreds or thousands of times! However, it is precisely because it is too similar to 5G and the specifications are too high that the development of Starlight has encountered some difficulties:
Star Flash chips are too expensive! Especially the WiFi-like high-end version SLB in Starlight, it is said that the hardware price is a little bit beyond expectations. Therefore, at present, Starlight is only planning to complete the goal of replacing cable on vehicles that are not so cost-sensitive.
However, as the low-profile protocol SLE in Starlight, the cost is probably acceptable, and it may be seen in the market next year. SLE module
Finally, there is still a gossip: Starlight may be the result of an emergency project after Huawei was sanctioned.
Looking at the date of establishment of Star Flash, it does have this flavor.
That is to say, after being sanctioned in 2019, Huawei used its own 5G technology to directly build a better "WiFi+Bluetooth" from scratch, and smoothly resolved the split between the two connection methods.
Four or five years ago, Huawei carried out a lot of urgent projects like Starlight.
According to the law of technology research and development, those "black technology" projects should be in the period of explosion in the past few years.
There have been rumors that Huawei may re-launch their 5G flagship in the near future.
If this news is true, there may be a large number of technologies similar to Star Flash behind it.