Honor’s Robot Phone has officially launched in China at a premium price, blending high-end smartphone features with a mechanically mounted camera arm designed for stabilised video, rivaling dedicated gimbal devices.
Honor’s Robot Phone has moved from concept to commerce, and its China launch has placed it directly in the premium bracket at RMB 9,999, or about $1,480. That pricing puts the device in the same general territory as Apple’s top-end handset in the market, but Honor is selling something far stranger than a conventional flagship: a phone with a mechanically mounted camera arm designed to act like a pocket gimbal. Tom’s Guide says the comparison is not merely theoretical, as the final version has now been tested alongside a dedicated gimbal camera.
The closest rival in that comparison is the Insta360 Luna Ultra, and on first impression the dedicated camera still has the edge. It is quicker to start recording, more natural to hold for long shoots, and purpose-built for video in a way a phone can never fully match. Yet Tom’s Guide found Honor had closed the gap more than expected, with the Robot Phone offering a remarkably similar shooting experience despite living inside a normal smartphone body rather than a separate camera rig.
The two devices also share some practical compromises. Tom’s Guide found that neither truly rotates its sensor for portrait video; instead, both crop from a horizontal sensor, which limits vertical footage to roughly 2.8K rather than native 4K. In testing, subject tracking on the Robot Phone was also strong, keeping pace with the Luna Ultra while walking in a busy Shenzhen bay area. The Honor device adds a Super Steady mode on top of the physical stabilisation, while its partnership with ARRI brings cinematic colour science that the Luna Ultra does not offer.
Even so, the dedicated gimbal remains the safer recommendation for now. Tom’s Guide says the Luna Ultra still wins on comfort, start-up speed and dedicated zoom hardware, while the Robot Phone depends on cropping from its 200MP sensor rather than using a purpose-built zoom lens. But the handset has a broader appeal because the camera is only one part of the package: buyers also get a flagship phone with a 7,060mAh battery, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, 512GB of storage and a high-end display. That larger proposition may be why the Robot Phone has drawn intense attention online, with TechRadar reporting strong social media reaction, especially in the US, even though Honor has no official American release plans and durability concerns persist because of the moving parts.
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