Honor has teased a breakthrough new concept, called the Robot Phone.
Due to be unveiled at MWC 2026, the phone has a camera mounted on an arm that behaves like a small robot eye, capturing photos and offering interactive experiences.
Honor has just set the cat among the pigeons, using the launch of its latest flagship phone in China – the Magic 8 series – to drop the ultimate tease.
While Honor's new phone offers flagship power from the latest Snapdragon chip, a massive battery and a big camera loadout, all the attention is on something else – the Robot Phone.
The name is a little strange, seemingly derived from the little robot arm that it offers. Yes, we've seen robot vacuum cleaners with arms and your next phone could have one too.
This arm appears to be a gimbal for the camera, which can deploy from the rear of the phone, but promises to be more than just a flexible camera.
Honor's teaser video shows this behaving like some sort of one-eyed robotic monster, peeking out of a pocket in awe of the world around it. There are strong WALL-E vibes coming out of Honor's tease, suggesting that this is going to give your AI assistant some sort of sentient existence.
Really, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, I think I'm doing both.
While Honor offers a great camera experience in its phones already, there's going to be a lot more AI behind the Robot Phone if it's going to behave anything like the teaser video.
Honor says that the phone will "become an emotional companion that senses, adapts, and evolves autonomously like a robot". That takes the idea of an AI assistant and ramps it up to the next level.
All of those personality traits and special functions will need to be bespoke to the Robot Phone, but the functions shown off aren't too far from the current reality. Tracking a subject to take pictures is easy enough (the Echo Show 10 was tracking people around the room in 2021), the idea that you can talk and get responses powered by the camera is interesting.
That's already possible with Gemini Live, which can talk to you about what it can see – so there's the chance that Honor could underpin Robot Phone with these existing technologies. But the personality? That's not something that Gemini currently offers.
The company says that "Honor envisions" this future for your phone, so there's every chance that this vision never arrives and the Robot Phone just remains a concept.
The bitter irony of comparing yourself to iPhone
For all the interest that Robot Phone is likely to garner (overshadowing a new flagship phone release in the Honor Magic 8), there's just one more thing that's worth pointing out.
On a LinkedIn post (yes, I'm going there), Honor says: "While the industry is busy comparing the iPhone, we believe it's time to break the mould".
It's wonderfully ironic that Robot Phone looks very similar to the iPhone 17 Pro. Whether this is a tongue-in-cheek move to demonstrate that there's space for a robot arm in that chunky design, or Honor is just choosing to create a phone that looks basically the same, I can't quite decide.
But here's the two side-by-side – I'll leave you to decide if this is boss level trolling, or the greatest irony ever.
The big reveal for the Robot Phone will come at Mobile World Congress in 2026 – so Honor has dropped a tease for something that's about four months from seeing the light of day again, with MWC scheduled for early March 2026.
If it does appear though, it could be the first literal Android phone we've ever seen.
