Gadgets
Honor’s New Smartphone Has a Built-In Gimbal Camera
A smartphone that puts cinematic photography and videography at the forefront.
Honor has been delivering some pretty great smartphones in recent years, and the company’s latest may just be the most interesting. Admittedly, the name is a bit silly, but the Honor Robot Camera is a smartphone that features a built-in, expanding gimbal camera, and we’re seriously intrigued.
The device is somewhat of a hybrid between DJI’s Osmo Pocket camera and a smartphone, pairing the two pieces of tech into one seamless product, integrating a fully motorised 3-axis mechanical gimbal directly into its premium phone design.
The camera itself is a 200MP shooter with a 1/1.28-inch sensor and f/1.6 aperture, paired with a 200MP Periscope Telephoto Camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor and 2.7x optical zoom. The 200MP Agile Gimbal Main Camera supports 10-bit ARRI LogC3 recording in ARRI CINEMA mode, while a 50MP Ultra-Wide Camera with a 122-degree field of view completes the versatile imaging system.
The most impressive bit is that the gimbal and camera fold into a cavity in the back of the phone, allowing you to slip it into your pocket like any normal device. Of course, it’s a little thicker than the sleekest smartphones on the market, but for a device with such a unique feature and powerful camera, the extra bulk is negligible.
The phone itself is also a pretty robust offering a 6.31-inch OLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (3 nm) octa-core chipset, and the choice of 12GBs of RAM (500GBs storage) or 16GBs (1TB of storage). Powering it all is a sizable 7,060 mAh battery.
The Honor Robot Camera launched in China in August 2026, and is due for a local release in South Africa towards the end of the year. The 500GB model is priced at 9,999 Chinese Yuan, so expect it to be around R25,000 (estimated).
