There’s no shortage of concept phones. Every single year, especially around CES, we see a deluge of devices with novel screens, new folding concepts, snap on cameras, smartphones that might one day wrap around your wrist like a wearable, rollable devices with horizontally extendable screens, and a lot more.
In a saturated ‘market’ of concepts, a Chinese smartphone giant has managed to show off a cool idea that genuinely feels different from the rest. The Chinese giant we’re talking about is Honor, and the concept in reference is its latest “Robot Phone.”
Honor highlighted the new concept in a YouTube video, and it honestly looks like a lovechild between a modern smartphone and one of those DJI gimbals with a camera attached.
The company describes the concept phone as a “revolutionary AI device that fuses multi-modal intelligence, advanced robotics, and next-generation imaging.”
A concept that might actually graduate to tangible hardware
At first glance, it looks like a regular modern smartphone with a huge screen, thin bezels, under display front shooters, and a beefy rear camera module. It’s only when the rear camera springs out that you realize something is entirely different about the device.
The rear camera, attached to an arm, springs up above the device’s top lip, giving the phone a wide-eyed Wall-E-like look. The arm, and in turn, the camera, appear to be capable of full autonomous movement, essentially being able to shoot photos and videos regardless of the phone’s orientation. A large part of Honor’s announcement video highlighted the concept device at a desk, facing down, with the rear gimbal-like contraption popping up and over.
Credit:Â Honor
The concept video does a great job of highlighting the concept hardware, but it does an equally good job of hinting at the device’s mechanical camera being intelligent. It’s AI-enabled nature will allow the device to autonomously frame shots, even capturing moments that you might want to look back on.
The Chinese tech giant, in an email to Android Police, confirmed that it will have “more details about this ROBOT PHONE at MWC 2026 in Barcelona,” which might suggest that the device might just actually graduate from a fantastical CGI concept to an actual piece of hardware that users might be able to buy in the near future.
