Just don’t call it the Gimbal Phone.
After over four months of teasing, I’ve finally been able to see Honor’s Robot Phone in action. And after all that, it looks pretty legit — just so long as you weren’t actually expecting a robot.
The Robot Phone could more accurately be called the Gimbal Phone, though I suspect the company’s marketing department would disagree. Its big hardware innovation is a 200-megapixel camera mounted on a gimbal arm, which unfolds from the back of the phone when you need it, and retracts behind a cover when you don’t.
It unlocks a set of camera features much like you’d find in a DJI Osmo Pocket. There’s improved stabilization thanks to the gimbal, meaning steadier video output. You can manually control the arm, rotating the camera or turning it up and down, or let the AI-powered subject tracking take care of that for you, with the ability to rotate almost 360 degrees — meaning it doubles as a selfie camera too. Then there are automatic shooting modes, like the swiveling spin shot, and Honor has plans for other automations, including AI video editing.
This alone would be enough to make the Robot Phone a pretty appealing prospect for some. Sure, it’s just doing the same stuff as an Osmo Pocket. But by combining that camera with a phone, content creators would be able to shoot and edit entirely on a single device that fits into their pocket, and the rest of us could get a phone with — supposedly — substantially improved video performance and main-camera quality for selfies.
