Honor’s Robot Phone dances to music and talks to you

Putting a gimbal (the motorised arm) in a phone doesn’t immediately make it a robot. That comes from the sort of sentience it offers. Rather than just using the camera to take pictures, it’s as much a way to control the phone as it is a method of capture, with the AI behind the camera giving it a level of personality. That’s the robot part.

Phones have been moving towards a more personalised experience over the past few years, with the learning ability of AI allowing for responses that are specific to you. Apps like ChatGPT and Gemini enable long conversations to develop ideas, while also recognising what the camera can see.

Honor makes it more interactive, with the camera making its own physical movements that reflect what it can see and what you’re doing. At a basic level, that includes following your face so that you’re always in the frame of a video call. The camera can also dance along to music, nod, shake and look around.

What can the Honor Robot Phone actually do?

There are some simple things that the flexibility of this camera allows. Imagine you’re cooking and need to move around while talking to a friend on a video call, for instance. With the Robot Phone, Honor says you’ll always be in the picture.

As a camera, there’s loads it can do. You can place the phone down on a surface, and the camera can rotate, locate you and take photos. You don’t have to worry about propping it up somewhere, either; the gimbal takes care of all of that. I saw an Honor staff member holding the phone to capture video, with the gimbal providing all sorts of holding options and stability beyond what you’d get from a normal smartphone.

None of this is as interesting as the “digital companion” features that incorporate the use of AI. I’ve seen the Robot Phone dancing along to music, I’ve seen it pretending to sleep like a cute animal, waiting to be woken up to “play with you”. Honor calls this “emotional body language”, and this is what makes it different from any other smartphone.

With AI behind the lens, the Robot Phone can provide feedback, so you can ask it if you’re wearing a nice outfit, giving personality that you just don’t get from any other device right now.

Of course, whether you trust the response or not is a different matter.

A gimbal is a motorised arm that allows freedom of movement through three axes: pan, tilt and roll. It offers stabilisation to eliminate things like shake and allows for smooth movements of the camera in all directions. Gimbals are common in professional video recording equipment and have recently made the jump to things like drones and handheld capture devices, including the DJI Osmo Pocket.

On the Honor Robot Phone, this miniaturised gimbal flips up from the rear, giving one of the cameras a wide degree of movement. The camera functions like an eye, which is where the “robot” name comes from. It’s like something from Star Wars or Pixar’s Wall-E.

Honor says it has reduced the size of the motors in the gimbal by 70 per cent so that it would fit into the back of the phone, with a sliding panel that covers the arm when not in use. When stowed, the phone is roughly the size of the iPhone 17 Pro Max, with a design that’s not too different, either.