Honor’s Robot Phone is better than a gimbal in a phone has any right to be

The Robot Phone, which launches today in China, doesn’t sound like a good idea — and not only because it’s not actually a robot. Instead it’s a regular Android smartphone with its main camera installed on a compact gimbal arm that unfolds from the phone’s rear. Cramming the equivalent of a DJI Osmo Pocket inside a smartphone sounds like a great way to get the worst of both worlds, but after an hour of testing, I’m cautiously optimistic that Honor has made this Frankenphone work.

This is a smaller gimbal than you’ll find on DJI’s compact Osmo Pocket line — Honor claims it’s the smallest in the world. It still makes the phone bulkier than normal, at 9.6mm thick (not counting the chunky camera section itself) and weighing 248g. Only the Samsung and Huawei trifolds are bigger, and my first impression was that the phone felt oddly dated as a result, despite the cutting-edge camera inside.

The gimbal camera will spend most of its life tucked inside the phone’s camera module, protected by a small plastic screen. Even folded away, the 200-megapixel, 1/1.28-inch-type sensor serves as the phone’s main camera, joined by a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto and a 50-megapixel ultrawide.

But the real fun comes when the camera arm unfurls. First, you slide the plastic screen off — manually — so it covers the phone’s other two cameras instead. Then, activate the gimbal through the software, and it springs into action. (If you try to activate the gimbal without sliding away the cover, the phone won’t let you.)

During previous hands-off showcases, Honor has focused on the “Robot” part of the name, highlighting a cutesy chat interface powered by the company’s Yoyo AI assistant. The camera can nod or shake its “head,” dance to music, and make other expressive movements. It’s a cute gimmick, but little more, and I was relieved that in this briefing I was instead given the chance to put the camera to the test.

Having the gimbal makes it easier to take selfies using the more powerful main camera, shoot at odd angles while keeping the display head-on, and record video with smooth panning and tracking. You control it using the phone’s default camera app, which offers simple controls in its photo and video tabs, and more complex options in a dedicated pro video section. Honor has also thrown in the fun option to take a panoramic selfie, the gimbal spinning around to take multiple photos and stitch them together.

The 3-axis gimbal has nearly 360 degrees of movement and a variety of tracking modes, including FPV, spin shot, super steady, and subject-tracking that can detect people as well as objects (and works in video calls too, though I’m not sure if anything beyond Weibo is supported). There are no additional physical controls, so you have to use an onscreen joystick for manual adjustments, which is a little finicky compared to dedicated hardware. Then again, the 6.3-inch phone screen is a much easier way to navigate settings and menus than an Osmo Pocket’s tiny display.

That’s helpful since Honor has packed in plenty of options. In addition to settings like resolution and frame rate, you can shoot in portrait or landscape, adjust the speed of the gimbal or the sensitivity of the joystick, switch aspect ratio, and toggle focus peaking on the display. Thanks to Honor’s partnership with camera company Arri, you can also record in a variety of different film-inspired looks, along with Arri’s own LogC3 format.

An hour wasn’t enough time to fully assess the gimbal’s performance, but I did get a sense. Video felt a little less stable than I’m used to from this year’s Osmo Pocket 4, but not by much, which is impressive given how much smaller the setup is. A few minutes of sustained recording is enough to make the whole phone get pretty hot, but that’s true of DJI’s gimbal cameras too.

I have a quick clip of test footage from my time with the phone, showing some simple panning from the main camera mode’s virtual joystick — I would have recorded something more exciting, but I wasn’t expecting to be allowed to publish the footage!

Photos seem to benefit from the gimbal too. The stabilization can help keep the camera steady between the multiple exposures that modern phones routinely stitch together for every photo you take. It was a bright, sunny day when I tested the phone, but when I stepped into a nearby church, it did an impressive job with the dimmer room and backlit stained glass windows. Between the fairly large sensor and the extra stabilization, this could be one of the better phones around for photos in dark conditions.

The other cameras seem impressive enough too, a natural fit for a phone that has flagship specs across the board. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, includes up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and has a substantial 7,060mAh silicon-carbon battery. It probably needs it, given the extra power drain of the gimbal. The chunky, functional design language is the only real giveaway that this is anything other than a flagship slab phone, at least until that camera unfolds.

Still, there are obvious reasons not to buy the Robot Phone. The first is that you probably can’t: Honor is only launching it in China, and has said it has no plans to release it elsewhere. That might change in a future iteration.

Honor also wouldn’t tell me ahead of time how much the phone will cost, but I’m going to go ahead and guess it’ll be more than simply buying a good phone and a separate Osmo Pocket, or the cheaper (if bulkier) option of a standalone gimbal to hold your phone. That’s the classic foldable problem too (it’s like a phone plus a tablet for substantially more than the cost of both!). You’ll have to be willing to pay a real premium to combine those two gadgets into one. The benefits may be worth it for some, like livestreamers who want to be able to shoot stable smartphone video and stream it directly, but most people would likely be better served by separate products.

The biggest concern is durability though. Honor says the phone has an IP54 rating for protection and dust and water when the camera is fully stowed, but that doesn’t apply when the gimbal is raised. Even closed, this is a little less tough than other flagship phones. That’s true of dedicated gimbal cameras too, but those aren’t likely to be exposed to potential damage nearly as often as your smartphone. Factor in the added risk of damage from drops, the potential for anything with moving parts to go wrong, and the presumably prohibitive cost of any repairs that fall outside Honor’s one-year warranty, and the Robot Phone is a big gamble for anyone to buy.

Do the tradeoffs make sense? For me, probably not. For some professional content creators, maybe.

I’m still not convinced it makes sense to squeeze a full gimbal arm inside a smartphone — Honor’s engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, yadda yadda yadda — but this feels like just about the best version of the idea anyone could be expected to make. It’s bulky, and fragile, and probably too expensive by half. But it does things that no other phone camera can, and it mostly seems to do them well, while being a little better than most phones at selfies, and low light photos, and recording steady video. Just… don’t call it a robot, okay?

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge