Honor Confirms Robot Phone's Camera Specs, Pre-Orders Already Breaking Records
Last Updated: 2026-07-28 16:08:34
Honor’s most unusual phone yet just got its camera specs locked in officially. At an Imaging Technology event held today in Hengdian, Zhejiang, Honor confirmed exactly what’s powering the Robot Phone’s headline feature, its motorised, gimbal-mounted camera, ahead of the device’s China launch on August 12.
The camera Honor has now confirmed
Latest and Popular Mobiles
The Robot Phone uses a triple rear camera system built around a 200-megapixel main sensor, a 1/1.28-inch chip with an f/1.6 aperture, mounted directly on the phone’s three-axis mechanical gimbal rather than sitting fixed in the body. Alongside it sits a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a second 200-megapixel periscope telephoto lens.
Powering the image processing is Honor’s own in-house Yuguang H1 imaging chip. The bigger story on the camera front, though, is Honor’s partnership with ARRI, the German cinema camera manufacturer whose colour science has shaped professional film for decades. This marks the first time ARRI’s imaging pipeline has been built into a smartphone, bringing genuine Log-C video recording and custom LUT colour grading directly into the camera app, tools normally reserved for dedicated cinema cameras rather than phones.
Related Articles
The gimbal is the real headline
What makes the Robot Phone genuinely unusual isn’t the megapixel count, it’s what the camera physically does. The main sensor sits on a titanium alloy, four-degree-of-freedom gimbal arm that deploys from inside the phone’s body in roughly 0.8 seconds. Once extended, it can rotate a full 360 degrees and physically track a subject, panning and tilting independently of how you’re actually holding the phone, rather than relying on digital cropping or software-based stabilisation. There’s also a SpinShot mode that tilts the camera 90 or 180 degrees for dramatic rotated shots, controllable one-handed. When not in use, the arm folds flush back into the body, disappearing from view entirely.
Pre-orders are already live
Honor has opened reservations for the Robot Phone through its official online store in China, and offline reservations began even earlier this week. The listing shows the phone in Moon Shadow Grey and Star Trail Silver, available in two memory configurations: 12GB RAM with 512GB storage, and 16GB RAM with 1TB storage.
Reserving isn’t just a placeholder either. Honor is offering a genuinely substantial set of perks to early buyers, including a lifetime YOYO AI SVIP membership, a full year of gimbal replacement coverage (letting buyers swap the mechanical arm up to three times if needed), a complete accessory bundle, up to 24 months of interest-free instalments, and trade-in subsidies of up to CNY 2,000. According to reports, pre-orders have already broken Honor’s own first-day reservation record, a strong early signal of demand for a phone built around such an unconventional feature.
What’s still unconfirmed
Beyond the camera system, several other specs remain rumoured rather than officially confirmed. Reports point to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, a 1.5K flat display somewhere between 6.3 and 6.4 inches, a battery estimated between 5,000mAh and 6,000mAh depending on the source, and 120W fast charging. Honor is also expected to run its on-device YOYO AI model on the phone, with the gimbal camera reportedly able to move independently during AI interactions, effectively doubling as a physical expression system, nodding or tilting in response to conversation.
Where you can actually buy one
For now, the Robot Phone is confirmed for China only, launching August 12. Estimates put Chinese pricing somewhere around 15,000 yuan, roughly $2,070. There’s no confirmed launch timeline for the US or UK, and existing trade restrictions currently block Honor from selling in the American market entirely, so buyers outside China shouldn’t expect an official release anytime soon, if at all.