Honor is hyping up a phone concept that looks too bonkers to be true – and for the moment, it is. The ‘Robot Phone’ has an articulating gimbal arm with a camera at one end, and the whole thing is hidden behind a sliding glass panel on the back of the phone.
When summoned, the arm brings the camera up above the top of the phone, and flexibly rotates it along multiple axes so it can get a good look around it. It’s kind of like the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 that debuted a couple of years ago, except that there’s a phone taking the place of the handle.
What’s even more nuts is Honor’s vision for the camera. In the video below, it’s presented as some sort of cutesy sentient all-seeing robot that wants to help you take selfies and time lapses of the night sky. You can see it in CGI action below.
Introducing the HONOR ROBOT PHONE
As much as it’s pretty out there, the idea of a phone camera on a gimbal certainly piques my interest. Years ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing some wild-for-their-time phones. The unifying idea with these was to allow you to use cameras without compromise – either by hiding the front camera in its own pop-up housing so you could have display without bezels and cutouts, or by adding a display to the back of the phone, so you can see yourself while you compose a selfie using the powerful main camera.
Honor
With a gimbal-mounted camera and some AI smarts, you could potentially have your phone compose better shots for you, take better selfies, and follow your face while you’re on a video call. I just don’t know if that’s worth giving up all that precious real estate inside the phone to the robot arm assembly.
Honor
We don’t know exactly what the company has in mind with this concept, and there could be more to this phone than meets the eye. Honor has taken some big swings before, including its Magic V5, which is possibly the slimmest foldable phone on the planet. Honor promises to reveal more at the 2026 Mobile World Congress trade show next March in Barcelona, so we’ll have to wait until then to discover what it’s got up its robot sleeve.
Source: Honor
