// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
Honor’s Robot Phone Has a Gimbal-Powered Camera for Vloggers
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.
The gimbal-powered 200-megapixel camera isn't the only camera, either. It's joined by a 200-megapixel telephoto camera and a 50-megapixel ultrawide, not to mention the 50-megapixel selfie shooter. The gimbal has 4 degrees of freedom, and you can activate it in the camera app or by making a palm motion on the selfie camera. And since it can rotate 300 degrees, you can use it as a selfie camera too.
The phone is shockingly light at 248 grams (the aforementioned iPhone 17 Pro is 206 grams). I wholly expected the Robot Phone to be top-heavy, with all those camera components at the top and the massive 7,060-mAh silicon-carbon battery inside powering the whole system. But in fact it’s decently balanced.
A glass cover protects the gimbal camera, and you can slide it to the right when you're ready to activate the gimbal. Once the camera is out, you can manually control the gimbal for ultra-smooth video capture through the camera app, or use preset motions to give your clips a cinematic look. There's even voice control with natural language, so you can say “turn around for 5 seconds.”
The motorized stabilization in the camera makes action shots—which can typically look shaky on traditional smartphones—look amazingly smooth. There are tracking modes as well, such as a subject tracker that keeps the selected person in the frame even as they move around. You can imagine how helpful that can be for solo travelers vlogging their way through a trip.