HONOR Robot Phone is now on sale in China with 200MP motorized gimbal
HONOR has opened the first round of open sales for the HONOR Robot Phone in China, the first smartphone to ship with a motorized gimbal built into its rear camera module. The device went on sale August 18 through HONOR's official online store and partner retailers, following its August 12 launch, at a starting price of CNY 9,999, about $1,483 or €1,281, for the 12GB/512GB configuration. A 16GB/1TB version is priced at CNY 12,999, roughly $1,928 or €1,666.
The headline feature is a four-degree-of-freedom (4DoF) titanium gimbal arm that rises out of the back panel in about 0.8 seconds, pans, tilts, and spins on command, and retracts flush when idle. Rather than fixing shaky footage in software, the phone physically moves the camera sensor to keep shots steady. HONOR calls the assembly the smallest of its kind in the world, and the imaging system was co-developed with cinema camera maker ARRI. The mechanism is built from more than 100 precision parts and protected by more than 100 patents.
The gimbal carries a 200MP main camera with a 1/1.28-inch sensor, an f/1.6 aperture, and a 23mm equivalent lens. A 200MP periscope telephoto sits behind it with a 1/1.4-inch sensor, f/2.6 aperture, 62mm equivalent reach, and 2.7x optical zoom, joined by a 50MP ultrawide with a 122-degree field of view. The main and telephoto lenses are optically stabilized, with the titanium gimbal doing most of the work on the main camera. Video reaches 4K, and the phone records 10-bit ARRI LogC3 in ARRI Cinema formats for flat, gradable footage straight out of the camera.
Powering the package is a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset paired with HONOR's H1 imaging processor. The 6.31-inch FHD+ OLED display, up to 16GB of RAM, and a 7,060 mAh battery round out the hardware, and Android 16 ships out of the box.
HONOR's Yoyo AI assistant drives the robot-themed software. A "robot companion" mode ties the assistant to the camera hardware, and users can rotate or tilt the gimbal with voice commands, ask it to focus on a specific point, or let it track a subject on its own. The motorized arm can also swing the camera around to face the user for vlogging, and it enables panoramic selfies by sweeping the sensor across the scene.
HONOR is pitching the Robot Phone directly at creators and mobile filmmakers. The gimbal removes the need for a separate stabilizer on many shoots, the ARRI-tuned pipeline handles color in the camera, and the dual 200MP cameras leave room to crop. The trade-off is the price: buyers pay premium flagship money and get hardware no other phone currently offers.
The sale closes a tease that began at the Magic8 unveiling last October, continued through a CES prototype and a working model shown at MWC in March, and ran through months of leaks. The gimbal has held up in early hands-on testing at the launch event, a meaningful result for a mechanism built from more than 100 moving parts. Moving a sensor on four axes instead of cropping and correcting footage after capture is the design choice that separates this phone from conventional camera modules, which rely on software processing or lens-level optical stabilization.
HONOR Robot Phone pricing and availability
The HONOR Robot Phone is exclusive to China for now, and HONOR has not confirmed any global launch plans. Both configurations ship in Grey and Silver finishes.
| Configuration | Price | Approximate USD |
|---|---|---|
| 12GB RAM / 512GB storage | CNY 9,999 | ~$1,483 |
| 16GB RAM / 1TB storage | CNY 12,999 | ~$1,928 |
Why this matters
The HONOR Robot Phone makes stabilization a mechanical feature rather than a software fix, and HONOR is pricing that engineering bet as a premium flagship. For mobile filmmakers, the ARRI co-developed gimbal and LogC3 support bring cinema-style color workflows to a phone, but the China-exclusive release leaves buyers elsewhere with no purchase path. The device is the first proof that a motorized camera arm can work reliably inside a smartphone body, and that shifts what buyers can expect from a camera phone.
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