Honor (荣耀) has put a 200MP camera on a robotic arm and tucked it inside a smartphone. What’s being called the Robot Phone starts at RMB 9,999 (US$1,480) and goes on sale in China on 18 August – no overseas launch date yet announced.
The camera rises from the phone’s back and returns to its groove when you need to pocket your phone
The camera rises from the phone’s back and returns to its groove when you need to pocket your phone. Its four-degree-of-freedom gimbal can swivel towards a subject, track movement and smooth out footage while the user walks or runs. Honor says it has squeezed more than 100 precision components into a handset only 9.59mm thick.
That gives solo creators some useful tricks. The phone can follow a Douyin livestreamer around the room or keep someone centred during a WeChat call. It can even obey spoken filming instructions. A partnership with cinema-camera company ARRI adds LogC3 recording, ARRI colour profiles and professional monitoring tools for some high-spec credentials.
Honor has also turned the camera into the face of its YOYO assistant
Honor has also turned the camera into the face of its YOYO assistant. It nods, shakes its head, dances to music and pairs its movements with animated expressions on screen to give the robotic camera humanoid elements.
YOYO Pro acts as a system-level agent, interpreting long instructions and completing multi-step tasks across different apps. Ask it to plan an outing, for example, and Honor says it can arrange transport and reservations in the background. This is major stuff and was a large focus of AI application at the recent World AI Conference in Shanghai.
This robotic camera solves a major problem for AI phones that we’ll address below. It also generates something consumers are very interested in. That interest is converting into sales, even before launch: Honor says reservations already passed 400,000.
The Dao view: Honor solves AI’s marketing problem in the robot phone
AI phones have a marketing problem: most of their intelligence happens out of sight. Honor has fixed that by giving YOYO a neck. A camera that turns, nods and dances makes for an immediate shop-floor demonstration. It also works as an eye-catching social media clip. Most importantly it gives the AI in the phone personality.
RMB 9,999 makes mass adoption unlikely, but volume is only part of the job, but the Robot Phone has solves built-in AI’s visibility problem.
