Honor just made the wait official. After months of teasers and leaks about its robotic gimbal camera, the company took the stage today to launch the Robot Phone, and it lives up to the hype it built for itself.
Honor Robot Phone is all about its robotic gimbal camera
You get a phone that folds a full camera rig into its body. Honor calls it a titanium alloy gimbal, which the company built from aerospace-grade titanium and shrank the whole mechanism by 65% compared to typical gimbals you’d find on a standalone camera.
The motor driving it weighs just 2.6 grams, yet it can spin the camera at up to 360 degrees per second, so it keeps up with fast subjects, quick pans, and sudden stops without a stutter. Honor says it packed over 100 precision parts and more than 60 manufacturing processes into that tiny structure, backed by over 100 patents the company developed in-house.
The camera hardware itself is just as ambitious. You’re looking at a 200MP main sensor sitting on the gimbal, paired with a 50MP ultra-wide lens covering 122 degrees and a 200MP periscope telephoto lens with 2.7x zoom. Honor even built its own image chip for the phone, called the Driving Light H1.
The company has worked with camera manufacturer ARRI to bring professional video features to the smartphone. The Robot Phone supports ARRI LogC3 encoding and LUT color grading files.
Honor is also introducing ARRI Look for mobile imaging, which lets users apply cinematic color effects with a single tap. The more advanced ARRI Cinema Mode includes features such as false-color monitoring, focus peaking, and cinematic aspect ratios.
YOYO Pro brings AI automation to the phone
The other major part of the Robot Phone is its AI system. Honor introduced its new YOYO Pro mode that can apparently perform long and complicated tasks automatically.
According to Honor, YOYO can execute more than 100 steps consecutively from a single command. Honor has also worked with Alibaba’s Qwen large language model to develop an AI solution optimized for mobile devices.
The company is positioning YOYO Pro as more than a traditional voice assistant. It can understand the user’s situation, recognize emotional states, and learn from usage habits and the surrounding environment. Honor says this is part of its larger push toward “embodied intelligence,” where AI can interact with the physical world and perform actions on behalf of the user.
The Robot Phone also introduces a YOYO Skills Store where users can install new skills with a single click. Honor says developers and creators can also use more than 100 system resources to create their own features.
Compact display and flagship hardware
The Honor Robot Phone features a 6.31-inch flat LTPO display with a 2640 x 1216 resolution. The screen can reach a peak brightness of 6,800 nits and uses an AR reflective film.
Under the hood, the phone is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor. It comes with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
The phone also uses a four-microphone array with an AI intelligent pointing algorithm. Honor says the direction of sound pickup can follow the camera’s gaze.
The combination of the mechanical camera system, large battery, and flagship hardware makes the Robot Phone a relatively heavy smartphone at 248 grams. However, Honor says its engineering work allowed all of these components to fit into a body that is just 9.59mm thick.
Honor Robot Phone Price and Availability
The Honor Robot Phone has been launched in two configurations. The 12GB RAM and 512GB storage model costs 9,999 yuan ($1,482), while the 16GB RAM and 1TB storage model will go for CNY 12,999 ($1,927).
The phone will be available in two colors: Star Trail Silver and Moon Shadow Gray. It will officially go on sale on August 18.
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