GoKawiilWhen 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.
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