Honor, StepFun and Nubia are pitching agent-powered devices as the industry’s next big thing, but unproven consumer demand and walled-garden app ecosystems suggest the technology isn’t ready for the masses

ZTE unveiled the NaviX Ultra at WAIC, calling it the world's first agentic AI phone. It runs ByteDance's Doubao. StepFun and Honor showed similar devices.

Tech firms are racing to roll out advanced smartphones that use artificial intelligence to do everything from ordering food to composing messages upon a simple voice command.