Honor has officially launched its highly anticipated Robot Phone in China, combining a mechanically moving camera system, professional video technology and an AI agent designed to carry out complex tasks.

The smartphone represents one of the more radical attempts by a major handset maker to move beyond the conventional fixed-camera smartphone design.

At the centre of the Robot Phone is a 4DoF titanium-alloy gimbal camera, which physically moves independently of the handset. Honor says the mechanism has been engineered from aerospace-grade titanium and is 65% smaller than typical standalone camera gimbals.

The miniature motor driving the system weighs just 2.6 grams and can rotate the camera at speeds of up to 360 degrees per second. The mechanism incorporates more than 100 precision components and has been developed through more than 60 manufacturing processes, according to Honor.

The gimbal carries a 200MP main camera, alongside a 50MP 122-degree ultra-wide camera and a 200MP periscope telephoto camera offering 2.7x optical zoom.

Partnering with professional camera company, ARRI, the Honor Robot Phone also features cinematic imaging capabilities. The Robot Phone supports ARRI LogC3 encoding, LUT colour-grading files and an ARRI Cinema Mode including tools like false-colour monitoring, focus peaking and cinematic aspect ratios.

The other major feature of the innovative phone is Honor’s YOYO Pro AI system.

The company says YOYO Pro can execute more than 100 consecutive steps from a single command, moving the technology beyond other smartphone assistants like Siri. It has been developed in conjunction with Alibaba’s Qwen large language model and is designed to understand context, user behaviour and the surrounding environment.

This development comes as part of Honor’s broader push into “embodied intelligence”, where AI is linked to physical hardware and can respond through movement as well as software.

The phone includes a YOYO Skills Store, where developers can access more than 100 resources to build additional capabilities.

The mechanical camera can also be used for subject tracking, video calls and automated camera movements. 

Among the flagship’s specs are a 6.31-inch LTPO display with a 2640 x 1216 resolution and peak brightness of up to 6,800 nits.

It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor and is available with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

The mechanical camera and other hardware make the handset fairly heavy at 248 grams, while the body thickness is 9.59mm.

The Honor Robot Phone is priced from CNY9,999 (around A$2,099) for the 12GB/512GB model, rising to CNY12,999 (around A$2,729) for the 16GB/1TB version, based on the latest CNY/AUD rate.

It will be available in colours Star Trail Silver and Moon Shadow Gray, with sales in China set to begin on 18 August. Honor has not yet confirmed a launch date or costs for Australia.