Honor Launches Its Long-Awaited Robot Phone And Yes It Can Wiggle At You

The big news here is the automated pop-up camera gimbal.

The Honor Robot Phone has been on our radar for a while now and it's finally available to preorder, though just in China for now. The "robot" in the name refers primarily to the automated pop-up camera gimbal, which does seem like a boon for photographers and videographers.

This gimbal is made from titanium and can move in various directions, including a full 360-degree rotation. This obviously allows people to get difficult shots that normal smartphones would struggle with. It supports a wide range of cinematic movement modes. These include a tilt lock, FPV view and a spinshot, among others.

There's an integrated AI algorithm for subject tracking, in which the camera will automatically pan and tilt to follow someone. There's also hands-free gesture control, which can be used to deploy the camera arm and capture shots.

The specs of the actual camera system are pretty impressive. The rear setup includes a dual 200MP camera system, with a 200MP main lens and a 200MP telephoto lens. Honor has also teamed up with a company called Arri, which is a manufacturer of professional cinema cameras. This partnership provides even more tools to budding videographers, like AI-assisted noise reduction and a larger dynamic range. Footage can also be previewed in real-time and can be output as RAW files.

The phone runs on MagicOS and introduces something called the YOYO Robot Mode, which combines "multimodal perception, contextual understanding, gesture recognition and physical movement." In other words, the camera gimbal has been anthropomorphized a bit. We attended a hands-off demo back in March in which the cute little robo-cam danced to songs, wiggled its head in agreement and rotated on command.

Honor promises that it's opening up the platform to third-party developers, so they will theoretically be able to capitalize on the multimodal capabilities of the phone. The company says third parties will likely "create new experiences using its gimbal, perception and embodied-interaction capabilities."

Of course, this is also a smartphone and not just a cute little camera that wiggles every now and again. The specs are decent. The Robot Phone features a Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 chip with a custom-built cooling system and a beefy 7,060mAh battery. There's a 6.3-inch OLED display that supports adaptive refresh rates, with a peak brightness of 6,800 nits.

It's available to preorder right now in two configurations. There's one with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage and another with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Shipments and official sales begin on August 18. As previously mentioned, the Honor Robot Phone is currently only available in China. In US dollars, the 12GB model costs around $1,480 and the 16GB version comes in at $2,075. Hey, robot gimbals aren't cheap.

Reporting from Engadget contributed to this story.