Honor Has Radically Reinvented the Phone for the Robot Age. I Played With It, and It’s Wild

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When Chinese phone brand Honor first teased the concept of its Robot Phone last year, I thought it sounded too outlandish to be real and too good to be true. The device it was proposing occupied the center point in the Venn diagram of my interests in robotics and unconventional phone design.

Even when I saw a mockup of the phone with its pop-out camera gimbal at CES in January, and then an early working demo at MWC in February, I was skeptical that it would actually go on sale. In my decade-plus as a tech journalist, I’ve seen plenty of bright and interesting concepts fall at the last hurdle. I’m always the first to advocate for less boring tech, so I hoped the Robot Phone wouldn’t be one of them.

On Wednesday, in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, I was thrilled that Honor proved me wrong once and for all. At the Robot Phone’s launch event, I got to play with the final version of the phone, which will go on sale in China imminently, priced at 9,999 yuan ($1,483) for the version with 12GB of RAM and 12,999 yuan ($1,923) for the 16GB version.

In the age of AI, not every phone should be just “another black slab,” said Honor CEO James Li at the company’s launch event. Given Honor’s growing expertise in the world of robotics (it has also built a humanoid robot), it wanted to find a way to fuse its innovation in the fast-expanding field of embodied AI with its phones.

From the front, you might not notice anything immediately unusual about the Robot Phone. Available in silver and grey and sporting a 6.3-inch OLED screen, it could just be another Android device. Flip it over, and that’s where the fun begins.

Unlike other phones with a camera bump on the back, the protruding module on the Robot Phone slides open to reveal a camera system on a three-axis gimbal that swings out on a robotic arm. It’s a radical departure from any phone I’ve been allowed to handle before, and it packs the kind of tech that realistically requires more than just a few hours of experimentation to truly master. Still, I was determined to give it a go.

The Robot Phone in action

Ahead of the event, I used the phone’s in-built Yoyo AI voice assistant to order a boba tea from a nearby shop to my hotel in Shenzhen. All I needed to do was tell Yoyo what I wanted, and it went into the app, placed my order and paid for me. Less than 20 minutes later, I was happily chugging my boba while still playing with the phone.

Powered by Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, the Robot Phone should be highly capable of handling AI requests you throw at it. But it’s also great to see Honor harness the chip’s power to bring physical AI features to a phone — something no other phone-maker has yet attempted.

The obvious standout feature of the Robot Phone is the robotic arm that swings out from the rear to bring up the camera. You can activate it two ways – either manually from within the camera app, or using gestures, which I tried out at MWC. If you choose the latter, the Yoyo app will open automatically, immediately turning your phone into your robotic personal assistant.

In this mode, it has around 10 gestures it can perform to express itself to you — including nodding, shaking its “head” (the camera), curious peeking and dancing in sync with a musical beat. This is complemented by over 100 emoji options that can appear on the screen simultaneously.

When you switch apps with the gimbal open, a pop-up gives you the option to close it, which I especially liked. I could easily imagine myself leaving it open in a moment of forgetfulness after using it, and I’d want to minimize the potential damage.

That said, the gimbal is made of tough stuff. Honor has used an all-titanium gimbal, into which it’s packed over 100 micro-precision components. It’s powered by a titanium alloy gimbal motor and a steel flip motor. Still, probably best not drop it.

To show quite how powerful and versatile the Robot Phone truly is, Honor has partnered with Chinese robotics company Seeed Studio, which has built various robot bodies that the phone can sit inside. The phone acts as the “brain” of the robots — one with wheels and arms, one bipedal bot — and allows people to interact with them using AI or a controller. The robot kit with wheels is available as open-source hardware for people to download. This means that if you buy a Robot Phone and have access to a maker space or kit, you can transform it into a robot that can actually move.

A cinematographer’s dream phone

The most obvious reason someone might be interested in buying the Robot Phone is that it packs handheld camera technology popular among creators, such as the DJI Osmo Pocket series and its rivals, into the body of a phone. This means carrying one device where once you might have had two, and being able to immediately edit and upload your footage without having to transfer files.

The phone features three cameras: one 200-megapixel main camera, one 200-megapixel telephoto camera and one 50-megapixel ultrawide camera. Co-developed with Hollywood cinematography darling ARRI, the main camera sits atop the swing-out module. When I used it in vertical mode, I was disappointed that the camera cropped in rather than flipped, which caused a drop in resolution from its standard 4K.

The three smart tracking modes allow you to choose between gimbal tracking, smart tracking and pre-composition framing. The phone also has six dynamic camera modes, including AI SpinShot, default stabilization, tilt locked, super steady, FP and FPV vertical. I played with the AI SpinShot feature, which allows you to spin the gimbal either 90 or 180 degrees with the touch of a button while recording, creating some very cool shots.

Honor’s partnership with ARRI is a shrewd move in establishing the Robot Phone as a serious filmmaking device. The gold standard of cinematography equipment, ARRI footage is often used as a benchmark for quality in video circles, and its cameras are the go-to for big-budget Hollywood productions.

Quality isn’t something I’m able to judge for myself at this stage, but when you enter cinematic mode within the camera app, the sheer number of manual controls is no joke. This might take some getting to grips with for those of us who aren’t pro cinematographers, but it’s great to have the opportunity to learn for enthusiastic amateurs. The inclusion of ARRI cinematic filters will also allow you to apply a range of classy filmic looks to your footage.

A bold, radical reinvention of the smartphone

In my early hands-on time with the Robot Phone, I was impressed with its features and versatility, but more so by Honor’s boldness. It’s the closest thing I can think of in the phone world to the avant-garde.

Cutting-edge design for every other phone-maker right now means foldables — and Honor is doing that too. Its Magic V6 might be the most stunning foldable I’ve had the pleasure of holding in my hands. But the company isn’t content to simply compete on the same playing field as all of its competitors.

With the Robot Phone, it’s blazing a new trail and going where no other phone-maker has dared. Is it a wise move to rip up the rulebook that dictates the parameters of conventional hardware design? It’s obviously a big risk, but it shows daring on Honor’s part.

“They are showing the art of the possible with a highly differentiated product, which will get a lot of attention amongst technology enthusiasts,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. The Robot Phone “represents the ambition that Honor has,” he added. “This is not unique for Honor because let’s bear in mind that they were the pioneers when it came to the thin foldables.”

The Robot Phone will be a China-only product for now, and the country makes an ideal testbed. DJI’s products fly off the shelves here, and the nation is deeply familiar with Honor as a brand.

Many Chinese phone brands struggle to distinguish themselves from one another — especially in the international market — and building a robot arm into a phone is certainly one way to cement your reputation as a pioneer.

“You’re going to see lots more of this from Honor in terms of them trying to push the envelope to relentlessly try and build the brand in the face of immense dominant competition,” said Wood.

Editors’ note: Katie Collins’ travel costs for the Honor event were covered by Honor. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own.

Katie Collins

Principal Writer

Katie is a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand. See full bio

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