I tried Honor’s ingenious Robot Phone and it is far more than a gimmick

Having first seen it at MWC earlier in the year – in a strictly hands-off demo – I have finally got my first proper close-up look at Honor’s wild Robot Phone. 

The headline feature is that mechanical camera arm on the back. Effectively tucking what looks like a DJI Osmo Pocket 4 gimbal inside the back of the phone. It’s an impressive feat of engineering for something so small, and it looks much better in person than it does in press pictures online.

Read through Honor’s press release for the Robot Phone, and you’ll find all sorts of bold claims about the number of manufacturing steps, patents and speeds at which it moves.

Each little feature is also seemingly given its own brand name – but the important thing here is that it’s designed to be durable, and move quickly and accurately.

The addition of the gimbal is there to give you super steady footage without relying on algorithms and electronic stabilisation. But it also offers the ability to manually pan the camera across the scene. It also supports some pre-programmed cinematic movements to help you capture really impressive footage that’s dynamic with very little effort.

It can also use AI to automatically track, or follow, a subject, panning and tilting itself to keep you in the frame. It’s all very clever, and during my time with the phone it worked surprisingly well, aside from a few teething issues caused by the device being built solely for the Chinese market.

The camera sensor boasts 200MP resolution, with a wide f/1.6 aperture. One thing I definitely missed back at MWC is that it’s joined by a telephoto zoom lens, which also has a 200MP sensor, and a 50MP ultrawide camera, to give you a very versatile camera system for video.

For pro video lovers, there are lots of promising features here: RAW processing 14-bit data, the ability to shoot in Log, and you can also preview ARRI looks in real time. 

Powering all these features is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, along with Honor’s H1 chip, and an effective cooling system designed to let you keep shooting for long periods. There’s also a 7060mAh battery that supports 120W wired and 50W wireless charging.

The gimbal works as expected, and the footage really does look good – even if I was only able to view it on the slightly chunky device’s screen.

Where things are less positive for me is in the AI and Robot aspects. The gimbal can dance, act as a personal assistant and answer questions while it looks you in the face. These are gimmicks, pure and simple, and not a reason anyone should buy this phone.

The Robot Phone is actually on sale in China right now. So if you want to get hold of one, you won’t find it in Western retail stores. It doesn’t seem like a wider release is planned either. However, I’d guess that we will see this tech, in some form, hit Honor flagships in the future.