The Honor Robot Phone is a badass robot, an interesting camera, and maybe a friend

After more than four months of teasing, I finally got to see the Honor robot phone in action. After all, it seems pretty legit – as long as you weren’t actually expecting a bot.

The robot phone could more accurately be called a gimbal phone, although I suspect the company’s marketing department would disagree. Its big hardware innovation is a 200-megapixel camera mounted on a gimbal, which opens 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 that are very similar to what you’d find in a camera DJI Osmo Pocket. There’s improved stability thanks to the gimbal, which means a more stable video output. You can manually control the arm, rotate or flip the camera 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 works as a selfie camera too. Then there are the automatic shooting modes, like rotating shot, and Honor has plans to automate others, including AI video editing.

This alone will be enough to make the Android phone an attractive option for some. It certainly does the same things as the Osmo Pocket. But by combining that camera with a phone, content creators will be able to shoot and edit entirely on one device that fits in their pockets, and the rest of us can get a phone with greatly improved video performance and main camera quality for taking selfies.

Obviously, the hardware achievement alone here is impressive. It may not be obvious from the pictures, but the Robot Phone’s gimbal is smaller than any gimbal in DJI’s Osmo Pocket line. Honor claims it’s 70 percent smaller than rivals, and is now the smallest 4DoF (four degrees of freedom) gimbal system in the industry, though this includes its ability to fold in and out of the phone’s body, with three pivots for the main pivoting arm.

Shrinking the gimbal “involves two major hurdles,” Thomas Pei, a product expert at Honor, told me. “First, providing ultra-thin materials to make the engine small and lightweight; and second, using ultra-strong materials to ensure rigidity and durability despite the thin body.” These are the same obstacles we face when designing a foldable phone, so Honor reused the steel and titanium alloy used in the phone’s hinge. Magic V6 When building the small motors that move the arm.

The obvious danger is that an undersized axle turns out to be a worse axle. At its MWC booth, Honor didn’t show off the Robot Phone’s camera against DJI’s Osmo Pocket 3 or any larger gimbal systems. Instead, it positioned its gimbal up against a flagship phone from Vivo — which has long been a pioneer in phone camera stabilization — where it seemed to record considerably more stable video, whether spun in a circle or held on a treadmill.

In a strange timing, all of this came a few days after Samsung revealed the ultra-stable Horizon Lock stabilization system on the device. Galaxy S26 phones. This does a great job of shooting steady and stable video, even when the phone itself shakes or rotates significantly. One test for Honor now will be whether its complex, expensive and fragile hardware solution offers enough of a quality boost to justify it over Samsung’s software solution. A lot of that will depend on how good the camera itself is, but other than the megapixel count, Honor hasn’t said a word about the specs to expect there.

Of course, the gimbal-equipped Honor phone offers more than just stable video. Subject tracking seemed quick and fairly efficient too, although it was possible for someone to move quickly out of frame and get lost in front of the camera. The stabilized gimbal arm should help improve low-light photography as well, though Bai told me that’s not the focus of the Robot Phone because it’s a problem that’s “already been solved” in the company’s flagship phones, while still video photography is “much more difficult.”

You can see that reflected, albeit in a very different way, in Vivo’s local rival Vivo’s MWC ad. I took the company to Barcelona for Tease the upcoming X300 Ultrais set to be released in Europe for the first time, with a renewed focus on video. In Vivo’s case, that means 4K 120fps 10-bit recording on the three rear lenses, a new pro video camera mode, and various improvements to how the phone handles LUTs. Most noticeable is the new official camera cage accessory, produced with SmallRig, designed for still photography and modular accessory attachment. It’s a very different approach to Honor’s, focusing more on integration into complex, professional workflows rather than simple content creation on the go, but it clearly reflects the same outlook: if you want your phone’s camera to stand out from the crowd, video performance is now the way to do it.

I’ve come this far without really talking about robot For an Android phone, this is on purpose. The only demo Honor was able to show me was a glorious chatbot app from LLM – using a Chinese model that Honor declined to name – powered by noises and the occasional gesture. You can ask the phone if it likes your outfit and it might nod while complimenting your dress sense, or if you ask it to play music it’ll dance to the beat – although 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.

Pai told me that the company is developing an accessory that would allow you to attach the phone to your backpack, suggesting it could talk to you while you walk, explaining the area you’re in if you’re wandering off on vacation or just chatting away to keep you from getting bored. “Instead of responding only through screens and voice commands, the Robot Phone recognizes and responds to movement,” says Bai. “Multimedia perception means it can recognize sounds, track movement and maintain visual awareness, creating a more natural, sensory and intuitive interaction model.”

But how far Honor sees this relationship going: At one point, Bai told me that the phone could be “a real companion, like a human,” but later noted that “it’s not very much like a companion, but it can make you feel comfortable, and that’s enough.” Will the Android phone be your friend? Even Honor doesn’t seem to know.

Perhaps it is due to the cultural divide. While the hon He insists that the autophone will be put up for sale In the second half of this year, this will be in China only. Pai suggests that a global release — perhaps for this phone, and perhaps a future one — is at least a possibility, but the company isn’t setting a timeline for that. Companion robots are It has taken root more deeply in some Asian countries Compared to Europe and the United States, robots tend to sit somewhere between working servants and terrifying destroyers. Perhaps this is why the debut of the autophone in China relied so heavily on its role as an “ever-present companion” endowed with “not only intelligence but also emotion.” If the robotic phone makes it to the rest of the world, I expect Honor to showcase it more for its camera appeal than its appeal.