After months of teasers and red carpet events, the Honor Robot Phone is finally official and it is now available in stores – only in China, but you didn’t want one anyway, right? Wait, did you?
The robot-like arm that acts as the gimbal on this device (and gives it its name) feels like the end-stage of popup-camera evolution. It provides stabilization on the move and, if you put the phone on a tripod, it does object tracking better than any phone out there. And yes, it can even look forward for selfies and vlog-style videos.
Honor Robot Phone’s gimbal in action
This teeny, tiny gimbal – it weighs only 2.6g and is about 65% smaller than the gimbals on the DJI Osmo Pocket cameras – is equipped with a surprisingly capable camera module. The 200MP sensor is a large one (1/1.28”) and has a bright f/1.6 aperture. Even when the gimbal is retracted, this is one fairly impressive camera – thanks to no other than Arri, which is best-known for building cameras for Hollywood movies. But when the gimbal extends, the Robot Phone is unique in the smartphone world.
Honor and Arri worked on adding creative shots like 180° pans. But this is also billed as an AI device – actually, an AI robot. It can use the gimbal as its “head” and look around, talk to you, dance and make expressions (drawn on the screen). This is powered by the YoYo assistant, which feels a lot more “alive” than the typical AI assistants and their disembodied voices.
The gimbal gives the Honor Robot Phone a lot of personality
Going back to the cameras, there’s another 200MP sensor on board, a fairly large 1/1.4” sensor in fact that is behind the 2.7x periscope lens. There’s also a 50MP ultra-wide camera with a 122° AF-enabled lens. And you can use the 50MP selfie camera built into the screen for those occasions when you don’t want to get the gimbal involved.
The Honor Robot Phone has a 6.31” display, but it’s not a small device – it measures 9.6mm thick (with the gimbal folded) and weighs 248g. It does have a massive 7,060mAh battery (with fast 120W wired and 50W wireless charging), which accounts for some of that weight.
And it’s built like a flagship with a 120Hz LTPO OLED display and a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. The phone is rated IP54, so we wouldn’t take it for a video shoot in the rain, but it is fine for day-to-day use.
To learn more about the Honor Robot Phone, read our hands-on review. Again, it’s only available in China, but if you are there, you can have the 12GB/512GB version for CNY 10,000 ($1,480) and the 16GB/1TB version for CNY 13,000 ($1,930). For context, a 12/512GB Honor Magic V6 foldable is also CNY 10,000. Hey, no one said that cutting-edge tech is cheap.
But would you actually buy one if you could? Why – for the camera, for the AI, just because you like cutting-edge tech or another reason?