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You hear it often: Smartphones have plateaued. A small boost to battery life here, a minor camera upgrade there—our glass slabs don't seem to change all that much from year to year.
That's exactly the kind of sentiment Honor wants to counter with the Robot Phone, which has a motorized camera that pops up out of the top. Honor has been teasing the phone since late 2025.
On Wednesday, the company officially made the Robot Phone available to buyers in China. Honor was originally a subsidiary of Huawei, but it's now a wholly independent company. While its Android phones are available in regions like the UK, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, it has no presence in the US, and the Robot Phone remains a China-exclusive for now. (Pricing is yet to be confirmed.)
Honor calls the Robot Phone a “new species of smartphone,” one designed to cater to the needs of the modern mobile content creator. That's the thinking behind its nifty trick of a gimbal-powered camera embedded in the phone, which makes it a potentially more enticing option for filming videos compared to dedicated gimbal cameras like the DJI Osmo Pocket or the Insta360 Luna Ultra.
Building that roving eye was no small feat. Honor says it had to develop the micro-motor for the gimbal itself because off-the-shelf components were too large, reducing the volume by 65 percent compared to traditional gimbals on the market. Honor claims the titanium-alloy gimbal motor weighs just 2.6 grams. It's embedded in a 6.3-inch smartphone that's only 9.59 mm thick (for reference, the iPhone 17 Pro is 8.75 mm).
The Honor Robot Phone and its 200-megapixel gimbal camera.
Photograph: Julian ChokkattuThe gimbal-powered 200-megapixel camera isn't the only camera, either. It's joined by a 200-megapixel telephoto camera and a 50-megapixel ultrawide, not to mention the 50-megapixel selfie shooter. The gimbal has 4 degrees of freedom, and you can activate it in the camera app or by making a palm motion on the selfie camera. And since it can rotate 300 degrees, you can use it as a selfie camera too.
The phone is shockingly light at 248 grams (the aforementioned iPhone 17 Pro is 206 grams). I wholly expected the Robot Phone to be top-heavy, with all those camera components at the top and the massive 7,060-mAh silicon-carbon battery inside powering the whole system. But in fact it’s decently balanced.
A glass cover protects the gimbal camera, and you can slide it to the right when you're ready to activate the gimbal. Once the camera is out, you can manually control the gimbal for ultra-smooth video capture through the camera app, or use preset motions to give your clips a cinematic look. There's even voice control with natural language, so you can say “turn around for 5 seconds.”
The motorized stabilization in the camera makes action shots—which can typically look shaky on traditional smartphones—look amazingly smooth. There are tracking modes as well, such as a subject tracker that keeps the selected person in the frame even as they move around. You can imagine how helpful that can be for solo travelers vlogging their way through a trip.
SpecsHonor Robot PhoneDisplay6.31-inch, 120 Hz, OLEDProcessor, RAM, and StorageSnapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, 12 or 16 GB RAM, 512 GB or 1 TB storageCameras200-MP gimbal main, 200-MP telephoto, 50-MP ultrawide, 50-MP selfie cameraBattery and Charging7,060 mAh, 120-watt wired, 50-watt wirelessSize and Weight151.43 x 72.86 x 9.59 mm, 248 gramsColorsSilver, GrayWater ResistanceIP54Some of these features extend past content creation. For example, the subject-tracking mode works in video calls, meaning you can set the phone up on a table (Honor includes a case and a magnetic stand) and the camera can follow you around. I also took a group selfie, and instead of taking a normal picture, the gimbal took three photos—left, center, and right—and stitched them like a panorama for a wide shot of everyone. Quick and seamless.
There's a less effective and quite gimmicky integration with Honor's Yoyo virtual AI assistant, where the gimbal camera acts like an enigmatic robot with a pair of eyes on the phone's screen. Ask it to dance to music, and the gimbal camera will move to the beat. It can pretend to be happy or angry, making the appropriate movements to indicate its mood. The camera also serves as the AI's eyes; ask it to describe the scene in front of you, and it'll take a peek.
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Honor says the case and magnetic phone stand are included in the box.
Photograph: Julian ChokkattuThat last bit could be useful, say, if you propped the phone up and asked the assistant to watch you assemble some furniture and point out any steps you might have missed. However, Yoyo doesn't have this kind of capability yet. Honor uses Google's Gemini assistant in markets outside of China, and if the Robot Phone rolled out elsewhere, that could be a very real integration with Gemini Live.
You're probably wondering just how durable this mechanical gimbal resting on top of the phone really is. Unlike with folding phones, which are measured in lab tests to withstand more than 500,000 folds, Honor doesn't say how much strain the gimbal's motor can endure. Instead, a company spokesperson tells WIRED the “gimbal mechanism has undergone rigorous reliability testing for repeated deployment and retraction. Its durability is designed to meet everyday usage needs throughout the expected service life of the device.” There's a built-in software feature that safeguards the gimbal from "inadvertent handling or abnormal resistance," too.
It's not the first time a phone maker has toyed with a mechanical camera. OnePlus famously had a mechanical pop-up selfie camera hidden in its OnePlus 7 Pro, offering a seamless display experience with no notch or floating pinhole camera, and its motor was rated for 300,000 cycles.
The design does sacrifice the phone’s overall water and dust resistance, given that the Robot Phone is only rated at IP54 when the camera is stowed. But Honor says not to expect the same level of protection when the gimbal is deployed, meaning you might not want to risk shooting that big romantic scene for your flick during a rainstorm.
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The 200-MP gimbal camera can rotate 300 degrees.
Photograph: Julian ChokkattuOne other big thing Honor is touting with the Robot Phone is its partnership with Arri, the cinema camera manufacturer. The Robot Phone supports various Arri workflows, such as LogC3 and Arri Looks, and the Arri Cinema Mode built into the phone's camera app for more precise video controls. These features may be enticing for budding mobile filmmakers, and they may directly compete with Apple's efforts to turn the iPhone into the mobile camera of choice for Hollywood.
Even if the Robot Phone won't launch outside China, it offers a look at one of the many ways companies are personalizing their devices to meet consumer needs, much like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8's new shape catering to media consumption. But it comes at a time when smartphone sales are down globally, as consumer electronics prices skyrocket due to the ongoing memory shortage.
But just how much should a camera and smartphone mix? Consumers are showing strong interest in compact cameras and action cameras at a time when the smartphone in our pocket can capture better photos and videos than ever before. Perhaps there's a limit to how much one device can do. We'll have to wait and see if the Robot Phone becomes a real smartphone evolution, or a confusing amalgamation—remember Samsung's Galaxy Camera?
