Honor Robot Phone hands-on review

In the somewhat stale smartphone market, Honor decided to shake things up a bit and finally launched the much-anticipated Honor Robot Phone. As the name implies, it's no ordinary phone, and it doesn't belong to the already existing Honor smartphone lineups. Instead, the Robot Phone bags several "industry first" technologies and it's built on over 100 patents.

And if the photos are not obvious enough, the centerpiece feature is the robot arm-like gimbal that extends and can do all sorts of stuff. Honor says it's the world's most compact gimbal, weighing only 2.6g and being 6mm thin. It's also about 65% smaller than the popular DJI Osmo Pocket series.

The gimbal itself is equipped with a large 200MP 1/1.28" sensor and f/1.6 aperture. In our experience, the phone felt like a proper standalone gimbal camera. It easily offers the best stabilization on a phone ever. It smooths out not just walking but running, too.

The arm can swivel without moving the phone, which helps you snap tricky shots or high-quality selfies with the main shooter. There are even creative modes like automatic 180-degree pans. The gimbal is also capable of tracking and following you, keeping you centered in the frame. However, it works only with people, and in our experience it might lose track of you in crowds.

Maybe not practical, but the gimbal can also dance and speak, while making faces on the screen when interacting with the YoYo AI assistant. It really breathes life into the otherwise somewhat depressing experience of speaking to your phone, and it feels as if you are interacting with a creature, not a screen.

Honor Robot Phone

The main camera on the gimbal is also aided by two other snappers attached firmly to the back of the phone - a 2.7x telephoto camera with a similar 200MP 1/1.4" sensor and a 50MP ultrawide shooter with macro-level capabilities.

But this goes beyond innovative hardware. The Chinese smartphone maker partnered with the professional-grade cinema equipment manufacturer ARRI. That means the Robot Phone gets native Log-C3 video encoding, LUT color grading and a dedicated cinema mode that makes the footage look like it's captured on a proper ARRI camera. Honor uses the Robot Phone as a wide-scale, open-world testing of the ARRI color profiles before implementing them in the Magic9 series.

During our time with the phone, we did notice some issues, though. The most obvious one is the weight - 248 grams for a 6.3-inch phone is a lot. Then again, it's hard to expect anything else considering all the extra hardware required. Honor used over 100 components just for the gimbal and went through 60 manufacturing processes.

Honor Robot Phone

Also, the glass that covers the gimbal is kinda flimsy and easy to move when you use the phone. And if you happen to do that the gimbal will refuse to back down. Not a huge issue as you get a warning on the screen, but a nuisance nonetheless.

Beyond the novelty, the Honor Robot Phone is a proper flagship. It offers a super-bright 6.3-inch LTPO OLED screen with anti-reflective coating and a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. The memory configurations go up to 16GB/1TB, while the battery is rated at 7,060 mAh with support for 120W wired and 90W wireless charging.

Sadly, although not a prototype but an actual product, it will only be produced in small quantities in China. Honor sees the phone as a tech showcase aimed at enthusiasts, not a proper commercial product.

The surprisingly low price (CNY 9,999 ($1,482) for the base 12GB/512GB version) suggests the same. There's obviously a lot of R&D and cost that went into building the Honor Robot Phone, so if the company wanted to make a second generation, it would have been priced more adequately. So treat it as a marketing piece and a tech showcase for now, as we doubt we will see a sequel.

In any case, it's refreshing to see someone trying to rethink the whole smartphone thing, since the last exciting form-factor innovation we got was the foldable phone and that was seven years ago.