I tried Honor’s robot phone that hides a gimbal inside, and it has a fatal flaw

In case you missed it, Honor has installed a working three-axis gimbal into a phone it calls the Robot Phone. It is not a conceptual apparatus; it actually went on sale in China for 9,999 yuan, or around $1,480 – although Honor has no plans to sell it outside of China at the moment. I spent an afternoon in London walking around in the rain with a pre-production version of the phone.

This is therefore not a criticism in the usual sense of the term. There’s no buying advice to give, because if you’re reading this you definitely can’t buy it through official channels – although I’ve seen a few eBay listings for the phone starting to pop up. What I wanted to know is whether attaching a motorized gimbal to a phone’s main camera actually beats the stabilization that all other flagships already do in software.

The answer to this question is more confusing than I expected. The gimbal mechanism works better than expected, but the images look worse than I hoped. I would go so far as to say that the Honor Robot Phone is actually almost good, which is not what I expected before getting my hands on the device. However, it has one fatal flaw, which is that the camera mode you actually want to shoot with is the one with the lowest resolution.

Honor calls this device the Robot Phone. The gimbal sits in the camera tray on the rear panel, behind a dust cover that you have to open manually. Press the gimbal button in the Camera app and a titanium arm extends from the phone, carrying the 200MP main camera across four degrees of freedom. When you’ve put the gimbal away, that same 200 MP sensor sits behind the cover for regular camera use. So this is a camera with two modes rather than a bonus lens. Next to it, you’ll find a 200 MP periscope telephoto lens with 2.7x optical zoom and a 50 MP ultra-wide lens, both fixed in the body as usual. One interesting feature I noticed is that the LED flashlight is a circular ring, rather than a covered light that you see on most phones.

Honor has also partnered with cinema camera maker Arri on the imaging side, which brings LogC3 video recording, official Arri color styles, and LUT preview. It weighs 8.75 ounces and measures 0.37 inches thick, which means it’s a heavy and bulky phone by 2026 standards. While the phone is, understandably, slightly heavy, it wasn’t as unbalanced as I expected.

Connor Jewiss/BGR

Camera aside, the Honor Robot Phone looks a lot like some of the other popular Android phones you can buy. It packs a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, a 7,060mAh silicon-carbon battery with 120W wired charging, a 6.31-inch LTPO OLED rated up to 6,800 nits peak, and it runs Android 16 running MagicOS 10. Although Honor doesn’t offer its devices in the US, it still sells phones across Europe, so the Play Store and Google services are present and functional.

I have to say I was impressed with the gimbal arm; it’s quite a feat of engineering. The arm unfolds at a modest pace; It’s not slow, but it’s certainly not snappy either, and I couldn’t hear the engine over the ambient noise of the street. When I tried to deploy the gimbal with the dust cover still closed, the phone did not attempt the movement, potentially damaging the system. Instead, a message appeared on the screen asking me to open the lid.

Stabilization is why this thing exists, and it works. Walking at a normal pace, the Honor produced the most stable images of any device I tested that day (more on that later), including a phone attached to a dedicated handheld gimbal. Tracking is the other strong point, with the gimbal keeping subjects centered around a full 180-degree turn of the phone’s body without difficulty. Honor claims it tracks objects as well as people, and from what I’ve seen, it seems pretty accurate.

There is no official IP rating on this phone, which Honor has confirmed directly. The company clarified that the figures circulating online are not its own. Despite this, Honor was happy for me to continue filming with the phone in constant rain with my arm outstretched, indicating that the device poses no immediate risk of harm.

I haven’t had a chance to shoot in Arri or LogC3 modes myself, so I can’t tell you how the note holds up. The camera app does show you a preview of the Arri LUTs applied, though, and it looks like they make a significant difference. For professional videographers, these filming options might be the phone’s most useful feature, although they involve a trade-off with fairly large file sizes.

Unfortunately, the Robot Phone’s biggest downside is that the gimbal limits video to 2.8K resolution. When you extend the arm, 4K video recording disappears, although it remains available when you record with the gimbal stowed. This means that the feature you actually want to shoot with is the one that gives you the lowest resolution. Honor hasn’t confirmed whether this was due to a sensor crop or a resolution limit, but a crop is the obvious explanation.

When filming with the phone, I found the built-in microphones to be a little too sensitive and the noise management didn’t keep up. I walked past a set of fountains and the recording made them sound like a thunderstorm. The tracking held up well until I strayed too far and drifted toward the edge of what the sensor could see, at which point it completely lost me. The screen also didn’t seem particularly bright to me outdoors, despite the 6,800 nits screen, and it lost about 10% of the battery in less than an hour of shooting with the gimbal.

The robot phone is also noticeably very heavy, although less than I expected from official measurements, and it’s thicker than any other phone you’d buy in 2026. YOYO robot mode, the dancing personality and gesture recognition layer, isn’t available outside of China, so I wasn’t able to test it. However, based on the demos, this doesn’t seem like a particularly useful feature – I definitely wouldn’t use it.

Honor told me the gimbal was durable enough for regular use, but it wouldn’t go into detail about the durability testing the company did. But replacing the gimbal camera module costs around 3,079 yuan, which is equivalent to around $457, or almost a third of the price of the phone.

I pitted four setups against each other outdoors, in broad daylight under heavy clouds and rain, in the same place and at the same time, walking in a straight line at a normal pace. I had the Robot Phone with the gimbal deployed, the Pixel 11 Pro XL using its locked stabilization mode, the iPhone 17 Pro Max to shoot standard video, and that same iPhone mounted in an Insta360 Flow 2 Pro handheld gimbal.

For stability alone, I’d say the Honor came out on top. The Insta360 iPhone was next in second place, followed by the Pixel, while the bare iPhone was the most fragile, as you would expect from a phone that doesn’t do any software stabilization. The gap between the top two is small enough that many viewers wouldn’t be able to tell, but the Honor was the smoothest of the lot.

But smoothness isn’t everything, and when you consider image quality, the results are completely reversed. Limited to 2.8K resolution, the Honor’s images were noticeably softer and noisier than the Pixel’s, which is slightly worse than the phone’s normal images because they are cropped at 2x. This is partly due to the resolution and partly because Google does a lot more video processing than Honor. But that means the Honor phone has the worst picture quality of the bunch. Personally, I prefer to have more fragile footage and videos that I would actually enjoy watching.

Devices like the DJI Osmo Pocket or any other phone placed in a gimbal grip completely avoid the sensor cropping issue because they can record in full quality. The advantage of the Robot Phone is that you don’t carry around a second device, but this convenience certainly comes at a cost.

Honor has not committed to a global version of the Robot Phone, but has not ruled one out either. It’s also unclear if this is the start of a new product line with later devices to follow or if it’s just an expensive way to get people talking about Honor. If there is one next, Honor will need to upgrade to a larger sensor so it can offer higher resolution video. Because as it stands, those who would need video stabilization probably wouldn’t be happy with the results.

The Robot Phone’s engineering certainly deserves more credit. Squeezing a four-axis titanium gimbal into a 0.37-inch phone body is an incredibly difficult problem, and Honor has solved it well. The gimbal mechanism was impeccable in the time I used the device, although it remains to be seen how well it will hold up over time.

Mechanical stabilization outperforms software stabilization when both work, and the Honor Robot Phone proves it. Honor has done a commendable job building the toughest moving part of this device – it’s the easy part, producing clear 4K video from the camera, which holds the whole thing together.