Honor’s Robot phone is real, and coming later this year

The camera nods, dances to music, and tracks faces. The rest of the specs are a secret.

Something unusual happened at Mobile World Congress this year. A device sat in a glass case at the Honor booth in Hall 3,  present, demonstrably functional, performing little robotic gestures for anyone who stopped to watch,  and yet not a single journalist was permitted to pick it up.

That device is the Honor Robot Phone. The company has been teasing it since October last year, and following its formal debut at MWC Barcelona, where CEO James Li took the main stage on 4 March for what Honor described as the company’s first main-stage keynote at the congress, it now has a confirmed release window: the second half of 2026, initially in China.

Whether it ever reaches global markets remains an open question. But the hardware on display in Barcelona is unusual enough ...