HONOR officially launched the world’s first “robot phone” — the HONOR Robot Phone — on August 12. The launch comes after the device’s global debut at MWC 2026 and a later appearance at WAIC 2026 (World Artificial Intelligence Conference) in July, so it’s finally making its way into users’ hands. HONOR CEO Li Jian described it as the company’s exploration of a new AI-native phone form factor — basically, an attempt to genuinely merge the concepts of “smartphone” and “robot” into one device.
The Robot Phone’s headline feature, and what sets it apart from every other flagship on the market, is a 4-degree-of-freedom (4DoF) titanium-alloy mechanical gimbal built into the top of the phone. The gimbal sits fully tucked away inside the body during normal use, so the phone looks like an ordinary slab phone at first glance. Trigger it, though, and it pops out in just 0.8 seconds, supporting 360-degree subject tracking along with 90°, 180°, and even first-person-view smart camera movements.
HONOR says stabilization hits CIPA 5.5-level performance, with a 96% shake-compensation rate while walking and roughly 70% better stability than a regular phone when running and shooting — essentially a mini gimbal stabilizer welded straight into the phone.
On the imaging side, the Robot Phone’s biggest card is its deep strategic partnership with Hollywood cinema giant ARRI. The two companies actually laid the technical groundwork for this collaboration months ago, and this launch is where it finally lands on a production device. The phone supports ARRI’s Log-C3 encoding format and ARRI Looks LUT color grading files, plus the AWG3 wide color gamut, letting straight-out-of-camera footage get closer to the color rendering and tonal depth of professional cinema cameras.
At an imaging tech event HONOR held in Hengdian, Zhejiang in late July, the company even brought in Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda to try the phone out and shoot a short film with it, demonstrating what this ARRI color-science workflow actually looks like on a smartphone. HONOR’s pitch is that this isn’t just “a phone with a better camera” — it’s aiming to be “a cinema camera that can also make calls,” packing Hollywood-grade imaging standards into an everyday user’s pocket.
To back up that ARRI workflow, the HONOR Robot Phone runs HONOR’s own in-house 200MP 4D gimbal main camera, paired with a 50MP ultra-wide and a telephoto lens to round out the rear triple-camera setup.
On the hardware front, the Robot Phone runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, paired with a 6.3–6.4-inch 1.5K flat display with ultra-narrow, symmetrical bezels. It supports 120W wired fast charging and packs a 6,000mAh battery. On the software side, alongside the latest MagicOS 9, there’s HONOR’s on-device YOYO AI large model, which handles emotion recognition, proactive recommendations, and cross-device coordination.
In official demos, it’s shown autonomously handling multi-step tasks like adjusting settings or hailing a ride, and it can even “express emotion” through the gimbal’s movements — nodding, shaking, or swaying along to music.
The HONOR Robot Phone launches in China with two storage configurations: the 12+256GB variant is priced at RMB9,999 (~RM6,052), while the higher-spec 16+512GB version comes in at RMB12,999 (~RM7,873). It’s available in two colorways: Starlight Silver and Moon Shadow Grey.
One thing worth flagging: this launch is China-only for now, with no confirmed release timeline or pricing anywhere else in the world, and the US market is effectively off the table due to existing market restrictions on HONOR products.
Whether HONOR will follow its usual “domestic first, global rollout later” playbook remains unconfirmed officially — though given this was billed as a “Global Launch,” an eventual worldwide release seems like a safe bet.
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