Honor’s Robot Phone is a bad robot, interesting camera, maybe a friend

After over four months of teasing, I’ve finally been able to see Honor’s Robot Phone in action. And after all that, it looks pretty legit — just so long as you weren’t actually expecting a robot.

The Robot Phone could more accurately be called the Gimbal Phone, though I suspect the company’s marketing department would disagree. Its big hardware innovation is a 200-megapixel camera mounted on a gimbal arm, which unfolds from the back of the phone when you need it, and retracts behind a cover when you don’t.

It unlocks a set of camera features much like you’d find in a DJI Osmo Pocket. There’s improved stabilization thanks to the gimbal, meaning steadier video output. You can manually control the arm, rotating the camera or turning it up and down, or let the AI-powered subject tracking take care of that for you, with the ability to rotate almost 360 degrees — meaning it doubles as a selfie camera too. Then there are automatic shooting modes, like the swiveling spin shot, and Honor has plans for other automations, including AI video editing.

This alone would be enough to make the Robot Phone a pretty appealing prospect for some. Sure, it’s just doing the same stuff as an Osmo Pocket. But by combining that camera with a phone, content creators would be able to shoot and edit entirely on a single device that fits into their pocket, and the rest of us could get a phone with — supposedly — substantially improved video performance and main-camera quality for selfies.

The hardware achievement alone here is obviously impressive. It might not be clear from photos, but the Robot Phone’s gimbal arm is smaller than any in DJI’s Osmo Pocket line. Honor claims it’s 70 percent smaller than the competition, and is now the smallest 4DoF (four degrees of freedom) gimbal system in the industry, though that’s counting its ability to fold in and out of the phone’s body, with three axes for the main gimbal arm.

Shrinking the gimbal “involved two key hurdles,” I’m told by Thomas Bai, one of Honor’s product experts. “One, sourcing ultra-thin materials to make the motor small and lightweight; two, using ultra-strong materials to ensure rigidity and durability despite the thin structure.” Those are the same hurdles faced when designing a foldable phone, so Honor repurposed the steel and titanium alloy used in the hinge of its Magic V6 when constructing the micro motors that make the arm move.

The obvious risk is that a smaller gimbal turns out to be a worse gimbal. At its MWC booth Honor didn’t show the Robot Phone’s camera up against either DJI’s Osmo Pocket 3 or any larger gimbal systems. Instead it set its gimbal up against a flagship phone from Vivo — long a forerunner in phone camera stabilization — where it seemed to record substantially more stable video, whether being spun in a circle or carried on a treadmill.

In a quirk of timing, this has all arrived just days after Samsung revealed its super-steady Horizon Lock stabilization on the Galaxy S26 phones. That does a remarkable job at shooting steady, stabilized video, even as the phone itself shakes or rotates dramatically. One of the tests for Honor now will be whether its complex, and potentially expensive and fragile, hardware solution delivers enough of a boost in quality to justify it over Samsung’s software solution. Much of that will depend on how good the camera itself is, but beyond the megapixel count, Honor hasn’t said a word about what specs to expect there.

Of course, Honor’s gimbal-equipped phone delivers more than just stabilized video. The subject tracking seemed fast and fairly effective too, though it was possible for someone to move quickly out of frame and get lost by the camera. The stable gimbal arm should help improve low-light photography too, though Bai told me that isn’t the Robot Phone’s focus because it’s a problem the company’s flagship phones have “already solved,” while stable video shooting is “much, much harder.”

You can see that reflected, albeit in a very different way, in local rival Vivo’s MWC announcement. The company took to Barcelona to tease its upcoming X300 Ultra, set to launch in Europe for the first time, and with a renewed focus on video. In Vivo’s case, that means 4K 120fps 10-bit Log recording on all three rear lenses, a new pro video camera mode, and various improvements to how the phone handles lookup tables (LUTs). More eye-catching is a new official camera cage accessory, produced with SmallRig, designed for steady shooting and modular accessory attachment. It’s a very different approach to Honor’s, more focused on integration into complex, professional workflows than simple content creation on the go, but it clearly reflects the same outlook: If you want your phone camera to stand out from the crowd, video performance is now the way to do it.

I’ve gotten this far without ever really talking about the robot of the Robot Phone, and that’s on purpose. The only demo Honor was able to show me was a glorified LLM chatbot app — using a Chinese model that Honor declined to name — bolstered by occasional cutesy noises and gestures. You can ask the phone if it likes your outfit and it might nod its “head” while it compliments your dress sense, or if you tell it to play music it will dance along to the beat — though in its demo version, it exclusively wants to listen to Imagine Dragons, proving that even when it comes to robots, there’s no accounting for taste.

Bai told me the company is developing an accessory to allow you to clip the phone to your backpack, suggesting it could talk to you while you walk, explaining the area you’re in if you’re wandering around on vacation or just chatting away to keep you from feeling bored. “Rather than reacting solely through screens and voice commands, Robot Phone perceives and responds through motion,” Bai says. “Multimodal perception means it can identify sounds, track motion, and maintain visual awareness, creating a more natural, sensory, and intuitive interaction model.”

But how far Honor sees this relationship going is unclear: At one point Bai tells me the phone can be “a real companion, humanlike,” but later suggests it’s “not that much like a companion, but can just make you feel comfortable, and that’s enough.” Will the Robot Phone be your friend? Even Honor doesn’t seem to know.

It may come down to a cultural divide. While Honor insists that the Robot Phone will go on sale in the second half of this year, that will only be in China. Bai suggests that a global release — perhaps for this phone, perhaps a future version — is at least a possibility, but the company isn’t putting a timeline on it. Companion robots are more deeply rooted in some Asian countries than they are in Europe and the US, where robots tend to sit somewhere between functional servants and terrifying Terminators. Perhaps that’s why the Robot Phone’s Chinese debut leans so heavily on its role as an “ever-present companion,” with “not only intelligence but also emotion.” If the Robot Phone ever does reach the rest of the world, I’d expect Honor to pitch it more on its camera than its cuteness.