You hear it often: Smartphones have plateaued. A small boost to battery life here, a minor camera upgrade there—our glass slabs don't seem to change all that much from year to year.That's exactly the kind of sentiment Honor wants to counter with the Robot Phone, which has a motorized camera that pops up out of the top. Honor has been teasing the phone since late 2025.On Wednesday, the company officially made the Robot Phone available to buyers in China. Honor was originally a subsidiary of Huawei, but it's now a wholly independent company. While its Android phones are available in regions like the UK, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, it has no presence in the US, and the Robot Phone remains a China-exclusive for now. (Pricing is yet to be confirmed.)Honor calls the Robot Phone a “new species of smartphone,” one designed to cater to the needs of the modern mobile content creator. That's the thinking behind its nifty trick of a gimbal-powered camera embedded in the phone, which makes it a potentially more enticing option for filming videos compared to dedicated gimbal cameras like the DJI Osmo Pocket or the Insta360 Luna Ultra.Building that roving eye was no small feat. Honor says it had to develop the micro-motor for the gimbal itself because off-the-shelf components were too large, reducing the volume by 65 percent compared to traditional gimbals on the market. Honor claims the titanium-alloy gimbal motor weighs just 2.6 grams. It's embedded in a 6.3-inch smartphone that's only 9.59 mm thick (for reference, the iPhone 17 Pro is 8.75 mm).The Honor Robot Phone and its 200-megapixel gimbal camera.