Forget foldables… we now have followables. HONOR just dropped a teaser for their Robot Phone, with a pop-out gimbal camera that can follow you around, tracking people like a DJI Osmo Pocket does… except the entire camera itself sits inside the camera bump of this audacious new concept phone. I have a LOT of thoughts (I won’t question the feasibility, but I will break down what I love/hate about it), starting with “Who the hell even came up with this idea?!”
I imagined a very different trajectory for smartphones. Most smartphone companies are exploring the foldable route, some trying to figure out what the next version of the phone will be (VR headsets, smart glasses, etc.), and some are even thinking about how an all-powerful AI device could usher the death of the smartphone. In all of this, HONOR decided to throw a curveball as to the future of smartphones – a phone that can look around without you needing to point it anywhere.
Designer: HONOR
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way before we get to the ‘bad’ stuff. This right here is a remarkable feat of engineering. Earlier this year we saw Roborock put a robotic arm inside a robot vacuum and my mind was blown. Then in September, Apple announced the iPhone Air which practically fit an entire smartphone’s computing power into its camera bump. HONOR looked at both of these things and said, UNHH Pen Pineapple Apple Pen… or more specifically, Robot Arm Camera Smartphone Camera Bump.
Before I speculate further, we literally have no details of what this phone’s specs, availability, or price points are. Everything is purely hypothetical at this point, but HONOR did point out that the Robot Phone will make its debut appearance at MWC 2026 in Barcelona this coming year. We’ll be on the floor and obviously I can’t wait to see this phone actually pull off what it promises, rather than just seeing a CG version of it in HONOR’s teaser video.
The phone looks exactly like the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max from the back – same rectangular bump with cameras, same matte panel on the back, breaking up the volume (although the iPhone 17 Pro Max did it first.) Except, while the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max fitted an entire screen around the camera lenses, HONOR decided to cram a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 into the phone instead. Activate the camera and a glass panel slides away, revealing the 3-axis gimbal camera that operates entirely on its own, electronically positioning itself and looking around before honing in on a subject.
The comparison to DJI’s gimbal camera is instant, but let’s also look back to the wild Nokia N-Series days. The N93 might have been the most incredible phone of its era, outshining everything that came before it. Imagine a phone with a camera that could be positioned like a handycam. The screen rotated, swiveled, angled any which way, while you film what’s around you. DJI not only managed to automate it, but also fit the whole damn thing into the smartphone’s camera bump.
Why must such a device exist? Well, there are two incredibly broad reasons apart from the obvious eyeball-grab of HONOR wanting to one-up other phone companies – the first, is that nobody loves their front-facing camera… so having a rear-facing camera that can somehow film you is always a preferred option. It’s why flip-style foldables have been such a hit, or even Xiaomi’s 17 Pro Max with the screen on the camera bump. What HONOR is doing is flipping the script, or rather, the camera. Instead of you rotating the phone to use the rear camera, it rotates to face you. That’s point 1. The second point lies in the fact that this is, in fact, a 3-axis cam – which means it doesn’t just look at you, it looks EVERYWHERE.
That’s the distinction here. HONOR’s video shows the camera being able to track faces and events (just like any gimbal camera or drone camera does), as well as sort of emote or interact with people, tilting sideways or nodding/shaking to somehow create an anthropomorphic effect. But more importantly, this gimbal basically means nobody has to ‘point’ their phone at anything again. You could shoot precisely without pointing precisely. You could capture panoramic shots without moving. And the most interesting part, your phone can look around even if it’s kept face-down on a table.
That feature turns into dystopia just when you start thinking of what this means for phones. Phones started off as communication devices in your pocket, then they became surveillance devices in your hand. Now they don’t even need to be in your hands. Just leave the phone on a table and not only will it record your voice, it can record everything around it too. It’s great but it’s also sort of a step too far… especially when you consider how powerful AI has already become.
Meta’s smart glasses have put cameras on potentially a million faces, allowing them to record POV videos. This one is a little more covert, if you ask me. Your phone could record someone even if you aren’t pointing your phone AT them. It could be harmlessly sitting in your pocket, while the pop-out gimbal camera records things around you. Great when it’s an assistant, but somewhat scary when it has agency. That being said, I’m sure HONOR’s thought long and hard about such potential scenarios – the company debuted a deepfake detector at IFA last year (to help users detect AI imposter scam calls), I’m sure there’s a team at HONOR that’s also figuring out protocols around apps weaponizing the all-seeing spy camera without your permission.
The cultural practicality is sort of overshadowed by the hardware practicality. We had moving parts on phones not too long ago… Oppo had a bunch of pop-up camera phones, as did OnePlus with the 7T Pro, but companies slowly phased that tech out because of how much space the hardware took, how it was the single most fragile part of the phone’s otherwise robust construction, and how moving parts instantly made any phone less water/dust resistant. How HONOR plans on executing this Robot Phone is beyond me, but I’d love to see them try. The camera requires some free space to actually pop out (and it needs to be absolutely away from obstacles as it closes. Dust, dirt, food, scraps of paper, anything could get trapped inside the phone’s camera-crevasse (that’s what I’m calling it), and more importantly, we’re not entirely sure what happens if the glass panel that protects the camera gets stuck while moving in or out. The camera’s 3-axis motor system is another headache entirely.
But then again, I trust HONOR to do the job more than any other company. They debuted the world’s thinnest foldable, and showed off some incredible chops with the pop-out camera on their MagicBook Art 14. The company pushes the limit of innovation far more than its European and American counterparts, and it isn’t afraid of trying something new, while we still wait for Apple to figure out foldables and build a proper AI assistant, for Google to figure out what the next step for phones is, and Samsung to build the tri-fold and quad-fold devices they’ve been teasing for months now.
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