Honor has milked its Robot Phone’s launch since late last year, but now the leaks and rumours are all at an end. The Chinese brand unveiled its new gimbal phone at an event in China that, finally, explains everything.
You may not be surprised to learn that the various data drops about the new smartphone were almost entirely correct. Many of these were done by Honor itself, so their accuracy wasn’t ever in question. Still, it’s nice to have all of the relevant information in one place. Well… except for one thing: local pricing. That’s something we’ve got to wait for.
Robot Phone home
The Robot Phone’s headline feature, obviously, is the camera. Honor calls its moveable sensor the Titanium Agile Gimbal, so named because it’s made from titanium. And it’s agile. Plus, it’s a gimbal. There’s a 200MP f/1.6 sensor in there. Honor calls that its Agile Gimbal Main Camera. The company also reconfirmed its partnership with German camera company ARRI.
Along with the 200MP periscope telephoto and 50MP ultrawide sensors, the gimbal supports 10-bit ARRI LogC3 recording. According to the company, this “preserves more highlight and shadow information for post-production.” A bunch of other ARRI tech is also within the phone’s capabilities.
The gimbal is similarly advanced. Honor boasts of various cinematic camera modes “that transforms the device into an autonomous personal camera crew.” Something called YOYO Robot Mode combines “multimodal perception, contextual understanding, gesture recognition and physical movement.”
That’s marketing-speak for ‘it’s really fancy, guys.’ The gimbal keeps a person in view and isolates said person’s voice, while an onboard AI agent can “understand user intent and execute complex, multi-step tasks across supported applications and system settings.” We’ll have to see all of this in action before believing the hyped-up language.
The regular stuff
The Honor Robot Phone is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, with either 12GB RAM/256GB storage or 16GB/1TB in the back. The 6.31in OLED display has a max brightness of 6,800 nits (and a fancy, Honor-conferred title). A 7,060mAh battery and 120W wired charging should keep the phone running for… well, long enough. The gimbal isn’t supposed to draw much power, but we’d rather see real-world performance for power draw.
The new gimbal phone is currently on Honor’s global website, but it doesn’t appear on the South African portal yet. Pricing and launch details are only available for the Chinese market at the moment. The Robot Phone will start in China at around R24,000. That’s… incredibly reasonable. Hopefully the pricing carries over to other markets.
