TL;DR
- HONOR has published a teaser for its Robot Phone with a motorized camera gimbal.
- The gimbal folds up and tucks down behind a sliding panel on the rear camera island.
- HONOR intends to further show off the hardware at MWC next March.
Feel like smartphone hardware has gotten too boring? Sure, we’ve got foldables aplenty now, but what are your options if you want something a little off the beaten path from your handset? The Nothing Phone 3 with its little Glyph Matrix screen on the back? Today we’re checking out what’s maybe the most interesting, innovative attempt to do something a little radical with phone hardware that we’ve seen in quite some time, with the teaser of handset featuring a built-in gimbal camera.
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Multi-point articulated gimbals like DJI’s new Osmo Mobile 8 make it easy to shoot professional-looking, stable video with our phones, but that means carrying around a separate accessory. At least, so far it has, but over on X, smartphone manufacturer HONOR is teasing a new “Robot Phone” with its own gimbal-mounted camera.
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In a video that looks more AI than not, HONOR presents its Robot Phone concept. Rather than the sort of pop-up selfie cam that might rise out of a phone’s frame, this depicts the gimbal as folding up and tucking away behind a sliding panel in the rear camera island.
For this teaser, HONOR has animated the gimbal camera in a way that’s a bit evocative of Pixar’s Luxo Jr. lamp. The spot highlights a few potential use cases for a gimbal like this, tracking action shots that keep the focus on the subject. We just hope HONOR is using a screen protector, because the company loves to show the Robot Phone lying face-down with its gimbal camera up and at attention.
The company tells us to look forward to getting more information at Mobile World Congress in early March, so we’ve still got a while to go before we might hope to learn something a little more concrete about Robot Phone plans.
Admittedly, the idea doesn’t look wildly untenable. Products like the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 have demonstrated what even very compact hardware like this can do, and if HONOR can really squeeze everything in here, there could be potential.
We’re just a little unsure how robust that hardware might end up being (even the idea of the sliding panel that covers the gimbal gives us pause), and it remains to be seen how bulky this solution might ultimately prove. But reservations or not, this could actually happen, and we’re very excited to see what HONOR actually manages to build.
Would you seek out a phone like this? Does the approach just seem over-engineered to you? Take a stand down in the comments.
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