Honor’s Robot Phone is better than a gimbal in a phone has any right to be

Honor’s Robot Phone is one of those ideas that sounds like a prototype someone should’ve talked out of, right up until you see it moving. It launches today in China, and the hook is simple: the main camera sits on a compact gimbal arm that folds out from the back of a regular Android phone. Not a robot, despite the name. Just a smartphone with machinery where the camera module usually sits still.

That’s a weird place to start, but the comparison Honor seems to want is obvious. The company says the mechanism is the smallest gimbal of its kind in the world, and it’s easy to see the appeal: the phone can stabilize shots in a way a fixed camera system can’t. It also carries the usual penalty for clever hardware. The phone gets bulkier, and there’s no way around that.

The Verge’s hands-on impression after an hour with the device was surprisingly warm. The idea of stuffing something like a DJI Osmo Pocket into a phone sounds like the sort of tradeoff that usually ends in disappointment, but this one apparently avoids the worst of both worlds. That doesn’t make it normal. It does make it a lot more interesting than the name suggests.