Honor has launched the Robot Phone in China, and the year’s strangest Android phone is now a real product with a real price. It starts at CNY 9,999 (around $1,482) for 12GB/512GB and goes to CNY 12,999 (around $1,927) for 16GB/1TB, with open sales beginning on August 18. The whole device is built around one idea: a 200MP main camera mounted on a motorised titanium gimbal that physically moves inside the phone.
The Honor Robot Phone gimbal camera
The gimbal is the reason this phone exists. Honor built the mechanism from aerospace-grade titanium alloy and says it shrank the assembly by 65% compared with the gimbal you would find on a standalone camera. The motor driving it weighs 2.6 grams and is 6mm thin, yet Honor rates it to rotate the camera at up to 360 degrees per second — fast enough, the company says, to hold a fast-moving subject through quick pans and abrupt stops. Honor counts more than 100 precision parts, over 60 manufacturing processes and more than 100 in-house patents in the mechanism.
Sitting on that gimbal is a 200MP main sensor with a 1/1.28-inch sensor and an f/1.6 aperture, fed through an in-house imaging chip Honor calls Driving Light H1, with AI subject tracking and real-time auto-framing. It is joined by a 200MP periscope telephoto at 2.7x optical zoom on a 1/1.4-inch sensor, and a 50MP ultra-wide covering 122 degrees that doubles as the macro camera.
Honor has also partnered with ARRI, the German cinema camera maker, for the video side. The Robot Phone records ARRI LogC3 and accepts ARRI LUT colour-grading files. An “ARRI Look” mode applies cinematic colour in one tap, while ARRI Cinema Mode adds the tools a camera operator would actually use: false-colour monitoring, focus peaking and cinematic aspect ratios.
YOYO Pro and the “embodied intelligence” pitch
The second pillar is Honor’s YOYO Pro assistant, which the company says can execute more than 100 steps consecutively from a single command. It runs on an on-device solution Honor developed with Alibaba’s Qwen large language model, and Honor positions it as reading the user’s situation, recognising emotional states and learning from habits and surroundings. A YOYO Skills Store lets users add new capabilities in one click, with more than 100 system resources exposed to developers.
This is worth a note of caution rather than applause. An assistant marketed as recognising your emotional state and learning from your environment is, by construction, an assistant that observes a great deal about you, and Honor’s launch materials describe the capability far more thoroughly than they describe what leaves the device. Honor has published no figures on the failure rate of those 100-step chains either, and an agent that takes actions on your behalf fails in more expensive ways than a voice assistant that mishears you.
Specifications
- Display: 6.3-inch LTPO OLED, 2,640 x 1,216, 1-120Hz variable refresh, 6,800 nits peak local brightness, AR anti-reflective coating
- Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
- Memory and storage: up to 16GB RAM, up to 1TB storage
- Main camera: 200MP on a 4DoF titanium gimbal, 1/1.28-inch sensor, f/1.6, 4K video, Driving Light H1 imaging chip
- Telephoto: 200MP periscope, 1/1.4-inch sensor, 2.7x optical zoom
- Ultra-wide: 50MP, 122-degree field of view, doubles as macro
- Battery and charging: 7,060mAh silicon-carbon cell, 120W wired, 50W wireless
- Audio: four-microphone array with directional pickup that follows the camera
- Software: MagicOS 10 based on Android 16
- Build: 248 grams, 9.6mm thick
Pricing and availability
- 12GB + 512GB: CNY 9,999 (approximately $1,482)
- 16GB + 1TB: CNY 12,999 (approximately $1,927)
Colours are Star Trail Silver and Moon Shadow Gray, and open sales start on August 18 in China. Honor has announced no US, EU or India pricing or availability, and the dollar figures above are straight conversions rather than expected retail prices. At CNY 12,999 the top model is priced against the most expensive foldables on the market, which is a lot to ask for a mechanism whose long-term reliability nobody outside Honor has yet been able to test — moving parts in a phone that lives in a pocket are a durability question, not a spec-sheet one. Honor first confirmed the launch date in July; our earlier piece on the Robot Phone announcement covers what was known before today.
Sources: GSMArena, Gizmochina
