The Honor Robot Phone adds a Gimbal and a 'Personality'

AI has so far failed to persuade consumers to buy new smartphones, but Honor reckons its AI-powered gimbal that will debut at MWC 2026 might break the mould.

There's no doubt about it that the Honor Robot Phone is something new. If it makes it off the drawing board and into consumers' hands it will include a pop-up tracking gimbal. As ideas go, there are many technical questions that we can think of off the top of our head about why this might not happen, at least in any useful manner. Battery life, the space to fit a 360-degree multi-axis rotating gimbal into the smartphone form factor without making it uncomfortably bulgy, how those components will cope with the rough and tumble of your average smartphone life. And more.

But Honor has an answer to all that skepticism. Not only does it combine the ubiquity of the smartphone with what is the most popular camera form factor of recent times (and if you don't believe us, check out the sales figures of the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 some time), it also has an animation that deploys industrial levels of cuteness to sell the idea. Think Wall-E with added saccharine.

Of course, how this all works in real life is a different thing entirely. There is a long way to go from a YouTube video stuffed full of AI imagery to actually having something people can use in a little under six months. But it shows where we are possibly going.

Two things spring to mind. First off, MWC, and possibly even CES before it, might have more innovation centered round the smartphone than we have seen for some time. And even though it's very likely only a gimmick for the animation, the use of personality to sell AI tools is only going to ramp up from here. Designs that can physically mimic “cute” behaviour are likely to be more appealing than the familiar slabs of glass and metal we’ve been carrying around for the past decade and quite conspicuously don't.

Crossing a  DJI Osmo Pocket 3 with a smartphone is one thing; wait till someone tries it with a Furby...