Honor’s Robot Phone hands-on: It’s wild, and it’s weird

Honor showed off its Robot Phone concept at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​giving us a first look at the device.

Honor calls the Robot Phone a “new breed” of smartphone that combines “AI-embodied interaction with robot-grade motion and cinematic imaging capabilities.” No, that doesn’t make the concept any clearer.

Having seen it personally, I can tell you that it is still a smartphone. It has a robotic arm that extends from the back, carrying with it a 200-megapixel camera. Once extended, the arm functions as a gimbal, allowing the camera eye to move freely in all three dimensions.

This could be useful for certain types of photography and videography tasks, but Honor seems just as interested in using the camera/eye to give the phone personality. Yes, it can nod at you or make other gestures that actually turn the whole thing into some sort of robot.

The gimbal arm required the world’s smallest micromotor.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Some real-world use cases, aside from looking pretty cool, include video calls where the camera’s eye follows you as you move, baby monitoring, and, yes, dancing to music.

Some of the units I saw up close were asleep, the robotic eye nodding gently, as if breathing. One of them followed the crowd and answered questions, nodding or shaking his head.

On stage, during a demonstration of Honor’s first-ever humanoid robot, the Robot Phone had a simple interaction with its human-sized counterpart, in line with Honor’s vision of connecting its gadget ecosystem via AI.

We weren’t allowed to touch the device, but it looked pretty close to a finished product. Honor says it created the world’s smallest micromotor for this robotic arm, and I can attest that it felt quite alive, although we weren’t shown how long it takes for it to deploy.

It’s unclear when the Robot Phone will be available as an actual product that you can purchase. For now, it’s an interesting take on a smartphone, although we’d really need to spend more time with it to see how useful the robotics part actually is.