Honor Robot Phone Launches in China With a 200MP Titanium Gimbal Camera and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Honor has finally pulled the wraps off the Robot Phone in China, more than ten months after the device first surfaced as a teaser at the Magic 8 series unveiling last October. Between that reveal, a string of leaks, and a prototype sighting at CES, the phone’s headline feature was never much of a secret: a gimbal camera built into the back of the handset. What’s new today is the full spec sheet, along with pricing and availability.

A Gimbal Camera Squeezed Into a 9.6mm Body

The gimbal is the whole pitch here, and Honor didn’t cut corners building it. The company says the system went through more than 60 manufacturing steps and over 100 precision components to get right, and it’s backed by more than 100 patents. Honor is calling it the smallest 4D gimbal system in the industry and claims it’s 65% smaller than the gimbals found in dedicated hardware like DJI’s Osmo Pocket line.

The motor itself weighs just 2.6 grams and measures 6mm thick, which is how Honor managed to fit the whole mechanism inside a phone that’s only 9.6mm thin. That said, the Robot Phone isn’t a lightweight; it comes in at 248 grams.

Sitting on that gimbal is a 1/1.28-inch, 200MP sensor with an f/1.6 aperture, capable of 4K video and paired with Honor’s own H1 imaging chip. Users can steer the gimbal with voice commands, telling it to turn or lock focus on a subject, and it uses AI tracking to keep subjects framed automatically during vlogging, livestreams and video calls.

More Than a Camera; Honor Is Calling It a Robot Companion

Honor isn’t positioning the gimbal purely as a camera accessory. Through the company’s Yoyo AI assistant, it doubles as a small robot companion that can observe its surroundings and carry out tasks on its own. Honor also gave it over 100 facial expressions, including nodding and peeking, and said it can even dance along to music.

Arri Partnership Brings Cinema-Grade Video Tools

The Robot Phone is also the first product to come out of Honor’s partnership with Arri, the German cinema equipment maker. That collaboration brings native Log-C3 video encoding, on-device LUT color grading, and a dedicated cinema mode built to mimic the look of Arri’s film cameras.

Full Camera Setup and Display

Beyond the gimbal, the rest of the camera array includes a 200MP periscope telephoto lens (1/1.4-inch) with 2.7x optical zoom, plus a 50MP ultrawide lens that also handles macro shots.

Up front, the Robot Phone has a 6.3-inch LTPO OLED display running at 2,640 x 1,216 pixels with a 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate. Honor rates peak local brightness at 6,800 nits and have added their own AR anti-reflective coating to cut down on glare.

Specs: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Up to 16GB RAM, 7,060mAh Battery

Power comes from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, paired with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. It runs MagicOS 10 on top of Android 16. Battery capacity lands at 7,060mAh using silicon-carbon cell tech, with 120W wired charging and 50W wireless charging on top.

Honor Robot Phone Price and Availability

The Robot Phone comes in Silver and Gray. Pricing is set as follows:

• 12GB RAM / 512GB storage: CNY 9,999 (~$1,482)
• 16GB RAM / 1TB storage: CNY 12,999 (~$1,927)

Sales open in China on August 18. Honor hasn’t confirmed a global rollout, and given the device’s niche, gimbal-first design, there’s a real chance it stays a China-only release.