雷科技
The 9th World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) officially kicked off at the Shanghai Expo Center on July 17. As an annual grand gathering for the AI industry, this year’s conference brought together domestic and overseas enterprises specializing in large models, AI applications and hardware manufacturers. LeiTech AGI (leikejiagi), an AI-focused new media outlet under LeiTech (ID: leitech), also sent a reporting team to Shanghai for on-site coverage.
(Image source: photography by Leitech)
During the exhibition tour, the LeiTech reporting team found that Honor boasted one of the busiest booths at WAIC. As a smartphone brand attending the World Artificial Intelligence Conference for the first time, Honor put real devices on display for visitors to try out, attracting crowds of attendees queuing up for hands-on experiences.
(Image source: HONOR official)
The undisputed star of the booth was none other than Honor ROBOT Phone, the world’s first robotic smartphone. For reference, pre-orders for this device are available across all sales channels. It is equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Ultimate Edition, a 6.3–6.4-inch 1.5K straight screen with four equal bezels, and 120W fast charging. Two color options are offered: Moon Shadow Gray and Star Trail Silver. The pre-order perks are highly generous, with gifts worth a total of 3,500 yuan. These include lifetime YOYO AI SVIP membership, a one-year worry-free gimbal replacement service, a full set of accessories, 24-month interest-free installments, and trade-in subsidies of up to 2,000 yuan. An official launch is scheduled for August.
The most intuitive differentiating highlight of the ROBOT Phone lies in its four-degree-of-freedom miniature titanium alloy gimbal system embedded in the top of the body. Under regular use, this mechanism retracts within the rear camera deco, making the phone visually indistinguishable from an ordinary bar smartphone; its thickness is far less bulky than anticipated. However, upon opening the camera application, the mechanical arm pops out swiftly without any lag.
(Image source: HONOR official)
According to official sources, the ROBOT Phone adopts the industry’s smallest four-degree-of-freedom solution. Its micro motor is over 70% smaller in size compared with mainstream alternatives, reaching CIPA Level 5.5 anti-shake performance and delivering 96% compensation for jolting while walking.
Live demonstrations showed the ROBOT Phone’s mechanical arm supports 360° rotational tracking, alongside intelligent camera movement at 90° and 180° according to user needs. To put it plainly, when you walk and shoot vlogs with this phone, footage stabilization that once required an external gimbal stabilizer can now be fully achieved on a single smartphone.
The imaging system also boasts impressive specifications: a 200-megapixel main camera with F1.6 aperture and 4D gimbal, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens, and a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto lens. More importantly, this is Honor’s first mass-produced product developed under strategic cooperation with ARRI, the Hollywood filmmaking giant. It marks the first mobile integration of ARRI Log-C encoding and LUT color grading profiles. Users now have access to professional photographic functions widely used by cinematographers, including focus lock, white balance lock, AE lock, and programmable camera movement data directly on the ROBOT Phone.
(Image source: HONOR official)
Combined with the mechanical gimbal’s physical image stabilization and multi-angle camera movement capabilities, this phone sets an upper limit for video creation that traditional flagship phones simply cannot match.
If the mechanical arm serves as the body of the ROBOT Phone, the on-device YOYO large model acts as its brain. Huang Fei, Honor’s Chief AI Scientist, previously released a demo video, and I witnessed this functionality firsthand at the exhibition. You can say to the phone: “Turn on anti-motion-sickness mode, adjust screen brightness to 40%, set a meeting reminder for 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, and book a ride-hailing car bound for the Shanghai Expo Center.” The device responds without pause and requires no step-by-step manual operations. All tasks run autonomously in the background except for ride payment, which needs user confirmation.
Such performance stems from the power of Agentic OS. This self-developed Honor operating system is more than an AI assistant tacked onto existing smartphone software. It remodels the phone at the fundamental level into an intelligent agent capable of comprehending complex commands, independently scheduling tasks, and carrying out operations across different apps. YOYO also boasts semantic understanding, emotion recognition and proactive service features. Instead of waiting for users to ask questions like “What’s the weather today?”, it actively judges appropriate actions and timing based on user habits and emotional states.
In my opinion, this forms the ROBOT Phone’s genuine competitive moat. Sophisticated mechanical gimbals are not challenging for current supply chains and can be replicated by competitors. However, the in-depth integration of on-device large models, system-level intelligent agents and multimodal interaction proves far harder to copy.
During Honor’s keynote speech at WAIC, Honor CEO Li Jian put forward a new viewpoint: AI hardware will inevitably shed its identity as cold, rigid tools. Ranging from operating systems to embodied interaction, smart devices will evolve comprehensively into human-like companion entities, reshaping the bond between humans and the physical world.
This statement may sound like overambitious forecasting, yet the ROBOT Phone has preliminarily delivered on these concepts. During its debut at MWC 2026 back in March, Li Jian stated, “A smartphone ought to be more than a black touchscreen slab. We aim to endow it with a brain and limbs.” The device is defined as the first new product category rolled out under Honor’s Alpha Strategy. WAIC marks its first full public showcase of its vivid, lifelike interactive experience.
Notably, Kevin Kelly, hailed as the Father of Silicon Valley Spirit, attended Honor’s WAIC sub-forum. His prediction in The World in 5,000 Days that technological paradigm shifts occur roughly every 5,000 days seems to ring true once again with the ROBOT Phone. The shift from multi-touch to multimodal embodied interaction may usher in the smartphone’s next 5,000-day technological era.
Honor is far from the only mobile brand making waves at WAIC. Other standout devices include NaviX Ultra, an AI agent smartphone co-developed by Nubia and ByteDance, and StepX Neo agent phone from StepFun. These products reveal a clear industry trend: smartphone competition is gradually shifting from hardware specifications toward semantic comprehension and real-world interactive capabilities.
(Image source: HONOR official)
At present, major tech giants including Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi have all placed heavy bets on the embodied intelligence track, fostering a broad industry consensus that embodied intelligence will emerge as the next trillion-yuan blue ocean in technology.
Ultimately, Honor’s goal this time is not to build a "better" smartphone, but a fundamentally "different" one. Its value lies not in absolute perfection, but in validating that smartphones can align their future development with embodied intelligence.
We will know how viable this path truly is in August.
The WAIC2026, themed “Intelligent Partners, Co-Creating the Future,” is currently underway!
The AI narrative is pivoting from stacking model parameters toward tangible Agent-driven productivity. Heterogeneous computing and photonic computing continue pushing computational limits upward. Embodied intelligence is accelerating real-world deployment—robots entering homes and factories, turning physical AI into reality.
LeiTech’s WAIC exhibition reporting team has arrived in Shanghai to capture the annual pinnacle of AI industrialization—stay tuned!
