A few months ago, Chinese phone brand Honor teased one of the oddest concepts we've seen for a handset: it hid a folding robot arm attached to a camera.
The idea was for camera arm to function as a stabilizing gimbal to capture steady footage, and then some. Impressively, Honor's engineered that wacky dream into a reality, and is now selling the Robot Phone for real.
Like we saw during the concept stage, the arm remains tucked away in the rear camera bump behind a sliding protector screen. Fire it up, and the robot folds out and brings the camera up above the phone's screen, where it's pointed at you for selfies, vlogging, and even some anthropomorphized interaction.
Honor is serious about the camera at the end of that robot arm, so much so that it teamed up with Arri – which makes seriously high-end cinema cameras – to develop it. It's got all the functionality of a gimbal, which means the arm will tilt and pan the camera while you're shooting to keep your shot steady and free of hand-shake.
The arm is attached to a 200-megapixel snapper with a 1/1.28-inch-type sensor and an F/1.6 aperture lens. It's not a huge sensor, but for most folks, this will negate the need to carry a separate gimbal like the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 or the Insta360 Luna Ultra.
The robot arm can execute cool tricks while you're shooting, like spin spots, panning to follow your subject, and keeping the tilt level locked. It can also respond to gestures so you can deploy the camera and begin filming hands-free.
The Arri partnership brings the brand's signature image science to your phone, include the Wide Gamut 3 color space and the ability to shoot in the Log C3 profile. This preserves plenty of detail and image information in your footage for professional color grading. You can explore a selection of LUTs (Look Up Tables) to apply cinematic looks to your videos right on your device, or explore a wider range of LUTs on a powerful desktop editing tool like DaVinci Resolve for more control.
Arri also provided AI tech for noise reduction, and image optimization to enable up to 14 stops of dynamic range.
From a couple of early hands-on impressions, it seems like Honor's worked on making it easy to take advantage of these features without requiring a lot of expertise behind the camera. That means travel vloggers and other types of content creators should be able to get a fair bit of use out of this, and skip carrying a second gadget.
The gimbal-mounted camera can also respond to your gestures like a friendly robot with nods and little jigs. It can even dance along to songs, and it pairs with on-screen animated expressions to sell the effect. Honestly, I could totally live without this bit.
That's not only the camera on board, though. This model also has a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto camera for 2.7x optical zoom, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide with a 122˚ field of view that can also do macro shots.
The phone's pretty well kitted out too. Inside its metal unibody, it runs a high-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip that's mated to a custom cooling system. The display is a 6.3-inch affair that supports adaptive refresh rates up to 120 Hz and a a peak brightness of 6,800 nits. The large 7,060-mAh battery can be topped off at 120 W with an included charger, or at 50 W wirelessly.
If you're lucky enough to find yourself in China, you can pre-order this now with either 12-GB RAM and 512 GB of storage, or 16-GB RAM and 1TB. Those will run you about US$1,480 and $2,075 respectively, and they'll ship starting August 18. That's proper flagship pricing – similar to Samsung's top-of-the-line Galaxy Z Fold models. Considering that a gimbal camera you no longer have to buy or carry costs about $500, this doesn't sound like a bad deal at all.
Source: Honor
