Decked out with a gimbal and shockingly good camera, the Robot Phone is one of the weirdest devices to come out of Honor. Even if you ignore the fact that it’s limited to China, Honor can’t keep up with demand.
When Honor began teasing a device that hid a fully functional gimbal and a 200MP camera tucked away in its camera bar, it truly seemed like an AI-driven fever dream of what future phones might look like.
Having played around with one this past week, I’m not distancing myself from that thought. Still, I can’t deny it’s a ridiculously cool idea, and a now fully functional Android phone the company launched last month.
Honor’s Robot Phone is aimed at creators more than anyone, for obvious reasons. The 200MP camera sits inside the device’s camera bar, which shouldn’t get you any weird looks if you use it in its retracted form. But as soon as you hit a certain dedicated camera app button and move the physical protective cover, that massive camera rises out of the Robot Phone’s rear panel as if it belonged in a horror movie.
The additional 50MP ultrawide and 200MP periscope camera do not move.
The camera app leaves controls up to the user, with full pan/tilt controls and a wide range to cover just about anything in view. It can be flipped 180 degrees for selfie capture, or used outward to record or capture the world in front of you.
Beyond that, Honor has packed some really cool film tools and recording formats. There are panning options and automatic spin controls to get neat shots you’d need to be really skilled to get with your regular old phone. The phone, being a product of Honor’s focus on AI, has object and person tracking. It works better than I anticipated during my short time with the phone, and stabilization was shockingly good for what is, again, a gimbal attached to a phone.
Its bag of tricks is huge, and it was a ton of fun to play around with. Honor pushes a little beyond simple camera tools with the AI-assisted mode, which is what some of the earliest teasers for the phone showcased. MagicOS has an AI assistant named “YOYO,” and it charges it with the ability to look around and gather digital information like a pair of smart glasses would.
It has its struggles when asking it questions in English instead of Chinese, but it’s a neat concept if a little unsettling.
Beyond the camera tools and mechanical gimbal, the Robot Phone brings many of the standard feature sets MagicOS 10 builds out for the manufacturer’s other devices. Overall, it’s a fun and interesting concept that deserves a ton of credit in what can often be a monotonous phone landscape.
At RMB 9,999 – nearly $1,500 – Honor’s Robot Phone is priced well, all things considered. That’s the running price for the 12/512GB configuration. The 16GB/1TB model nears $2,000.
But you probably couldn’t buy it if you wanted to. On top of being launched for the Chinese market with no global launch expected, Honor shared that the device reached sales targets almost immediately. It seemingly kept expectations low, and now has to catch up with demand while supplies are difficult to get a hand on for reasonable prices.
Again, I only messed around with the Robot Phone for a short time, but it ended up being one of those hands-on sessions that reminded me phones can be exceptionally fun. I’m not saying every phone should have an extending gimbal and overkill camera setup, but it’s kind of cool that the option exists – even if heavily limited.
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