After a day of traversing the Mobile World Congress show floor, I was feeling more than a little disheveled. I was about to film a video, and was worried that I wasn’t putting my best foot forward, but Honor’s Robot Phone disagreed.
“What do you think of my hair?” I asked it. The pop-up camera perched atop the device swivelled on its axis, looking me up and down.
“Your long flowing blonde hair looks soft and shiny,” it told me. “It pairs really well with your black outfit, giving you a warm and vibrant feel, which is great for this tech event!”
I’m still not sure I believed it, but it was certainly the confidence boost I needed in the moment.
I’ll hold my hands up and admit that when Honor first said it was making a robot phone, I didn’t necessarily think it would ever see the light of day. But all credit to the Chinese tech company — it’s actually delivered.
At CES back in January, I saw an early, nonworking version of the phone, and this week at MWC, I finally saw it in action. Inside the back of the phone, hidden by a sliding cover, is a robot arm with a gimbal and a camera. To lure the camera from its shell, you simply hold your palm up to the front-facing camera, turn that same hand around, and out it comes.
The camera has AI object tracking and can lock onto you as you’re filming or interacting with it, following you even if you turn the phone around. This is how it was able to look me up and down and tell me my hair and outfit were working so well for me.
For several years, we’ve seen an influx of AI come to smartphones, but so far, that’s resulted primarily in changes to software — not to hardware. The Robot Phone flips that trend on its head by switching up the entire design of a phone in order to imbue it with physical AI capabilities.
AI evolves fast, Honor’s Robot Phone Product Expert Thomas Bai told me as he demoed the device at the company booth. Now, he added, it’s time for the phone’s body to catch up with its brain.
Read more: First Steps? Honor’s Humanoid Robot Makes Its Debut With a Moonwalk and a Backflip
How do you put a robot inside a phone?
I’m not the only one who thought Honor might be trying to achieve the impossible by putting a robot inside a phone. The company also wasn’t sure it would work. It went to a micro motor company, which told Honor it couldn’t help, said Bai.
Instead, Honor had to go it alone. It realized the motor would need to meet two standards, said Bai. “One is extreme lightness, and the second is extreme strength.” That rung a bell, he added, “because it’s exactly the same challenge that we faced when we built the foldable hinges.”
The Robot Phone is a feat of engineering.
In that sense, Honor’s folding phones, such as the brand-new Magic V6, walked so that the Robot Phone could run (or at least swivel around on a three-axis gimbal). The same material Honor uses for its folding hinges — super steel and a titanium alloy — is now inside the micro motor, which is 70% smaller than anything currently available on the market.
This wasn’t even the most difficult part of building the Robot Phone. “Space is the ultimate challenge, because inside a flagship smartphone, every millimeter counts,” said Bai. In spite of this, Honor hasn’t had to make any compromises, he added.
“Everybody says, if you want to put a gimbal in the phone, then you have to sacrifice battery life,” said Bai. Again, the expertise Honor has garnered building very thin, very power-hungry foldables has come into play here. The same silicon-carbon battery tech that powers the V6 is inside the Robot Phone.
The target market for the Robot Phone, which Honor wants to start selling in the second half of this year, is clearly content creators; the kind of people who currently use a DJI Osmo Pocket. It’s sure to capture their attention — no one wants to carry two devices when one will do — but people who own Osmos tend to have high standards for image quality.
Will the Robot Phone be able to match up to the Osmo? “Definitely,” said Bai. “We are quite confident about our video quality.” He points to Honor’s newly announced partnership with Arri, a camera company beloved by cinematographers for its pro-level shooting, as well as the company’s existing phone camera capabilities. “This will be all implemented inside the Robot Phone,” he said.
The 200-megapixel sensor, combined with stabilization and what Honor is calling AI Spinshot (intelligent 90- and 180-degree rotational movement for fluid, cinematic transitions) does sound promising, but we’ll have to put it to the test ourselves to be sure.
In my short demo time with the phone, I can say that it definitely managed to swivel fast enough to keep up with me as I moved, and I definitely appreciated the compliments it gave me on not just my hair, but my outfit, which it declared ideal for a slightly chilly and overcast Barcelona day.
By the end of my demo, as the Robot Phone and I danced side by side to Believers by Imagine Dragons, I almost felt like we were pals. It would never have been my first choice of song, but that’s the thing about true friendship — you sometimes have to embrace each other’s bad taste in music in order to bond.
Watch this: Honor Unveils Its First Humanoid Robot at MWC
