You've not seen anything like the Honor Robot Phone before, but we can't tell yet if that's a good thing.
Honor just announced its new concept phone at a Beijing event, but the device won't get a full debut until MWC 2026 in Barcelona. In essence, it's a phone with a camera gimbal that slots into the back of the phone under a sliding panel, but can rotate all the way out to the front when needed.
The gimbal will be the key to enabling "AI-powered multi-modal intelligence, robotic functionality, and advanced handheld imaging capabilities," as Honor describes them. It also identifies this phone as "an emotional companion that senses, adapts, and evolves autonomously like a robot, enriching its users’ lives with love, joy, and wisdom."
The YouTube video above shows how this might work, although we can't say how much creative license Honor has taken when showing what this phone can do. Between the family animation-style music and little voice lines given to the "robot", it's definitely focused more on painting us a picture than explaining concrete features and hardware.
The page on Honor's global website doesn't explain much more. There's also a dedicated r/HONORROBOTPHONES subreddit you can join, except at the time of writing, the community's currently banned for an unknown reason.
All part of the plan
Honor calls the Robot Phone a key future part of its "Alpha Plan," the company's outline for evolving into a more AI-focused company. And the Magic8 Pro, which debuted at the same event, is similarly trained on this vision.
The Magic8 Pro looks like a more standard flagship Android phone but is according to Honor a "Self-Evolving AI Smartphone", thanks to a YOYO Agent promising to automate thousands of tasks. While it's not clear whether these capabilities will make it to the global version of the phone, we will still hopefully benefit from the Magic8Pro's 200MP telephoto camera and large 7,200 mAh battery with 120W charging.
Hopefully, Honor will keep us informed about the Robot Phone and its actual features between now and March 2026, but if the Barcelona conference is the first place everything gets shown off, we'll be there to tell you all about it. Whether this is a genuine future direction for phones, or a weird evolutionary dead end, we're excited to see what unfolds.
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