This Company Built an Android Phone With a Robot Arm. It’s Billed as a ‘New Species of Smartphone’

Why would a manufacturer this capable pour so much effort into a product this strange?

HONOR Robot Phone. Photo: Courtesy Company

On August 12, Honor, a Chinese manufacturer spun out of Huawei in 2020, launched the Robot Phone in China for 9,999 yuan (about $1,480). It is an Android flagship whose main camera sits on a motorized gimbal, the stabilizing rig filmmakers use to keep moving footage steady. Folded flat, it works as an ordinary, if thick, high-end phone. Deployed, the arm pans, tilts, and physically tracks whatever it is filming, such as a subject crossing a room, a vlogger mid-walk, or the owner’s own face for selfies. 

Through Honor’s AI assistant, the arm can cock its head, shake it, and react with more than 100 onscreen emojis. Honor has even partnered with robotics firms so the phone can dock inside small robot bodies and serve as their brain. Honor calls it “a new species of smartphone” yet curiously says it has no plans to sell it outside China. 

Honor says the gimbal packs more than 100 precision components into a module 65 percent smaller than standalone gimbal cameras like DJI’s Osmo Pocket line. Plus, the color processing comes from a partnership with Arri, the German company whose cinema cameras shoot much of Hollywood. All of this leads to a key question: Why would a manufacturer this capable pour this much effort into a product this strange?

The market behind the arm

China’s smartphone shipments fell 4.3 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to IDC—the fifth consecutive quarterly decline. Surging memory prices have forced most Android makers to raise prices into already soft demand, and the results split the market cleanly. Huawei and Apple grew close to 20 and 25 percent, respectively, while nearly everyone else shrank. Honor, one of the six brands that control 94 percent of the Chinese market, lost share, and analysts at Isaiah Research now expect it to ship 46 to 48 million phones in 2026, revised down from earlier targets. Omdia forecasts the market as a whole will contract 6 percent this year.

Weekly roundup of the latest in tech news

An Inc.com Featured Presentation

While memory prices have accelerated this struggle, it’s been brewing in the background for a while now. Phones got good enough that people stopped replacing them frequently. Every flagship now runs a similar chip behind a similar screen, with three cameras arranged slightly differently. Trade-in data from Assurant puts the average age of a U.S. device at upgrade at 3.84 years through the first three quarters of 2025, up from 3.16 years in 2020. A manufacturer selling into that market has to offer buyers something a two-year-old phone cannot already do. What remains is gimmicky spectacle.

Companies have turned to spectacle in these conditions before. LG, carrying 23 consecutive quarters of mobile losses, mounted a swiveling second screen on the $999 Wing in the fall of 2020, but by the following April it had left the phone business entirely. Humane, founded by Apple alumni, raised more than $230 million for the AI Pin, a wearable meant to make the smartphone obsolete. It aimed to sell 100,000 units in its first year, sold roughly 10,000, and within a year of shipping, HP had bought the remains for $116 million while the Pins themselves went dark. Rabbit’s $199 R1 stole CES in 2024, then shipped as a device reviewers found it could do little that a free phone app could not. All three were losing fights they could not win on quality or price, and each responded with hardware whose main job was getting noticed.

Worse at both jobs

The test for a gimmick is whether the combined product beats buying the parts separately. Much of the launch coverage of Honor’s Robot Phone has bordered on gushing, but the most balanced hands-on published so far makes the case that the Robot Phone fails. The Verge’s Dominic Preston spent an hour with the device at launch and came away calling it roughly the “best version of the idea anyone could have built.”

Source: www.inc.com