Malaysian creators who want smooth, gradable video have been reaching for a pocket gimbal camera and carrying a second device to do it. Honor's new Robot Phone is a bet that the phone already in your hand can take over that job, and it has brought in ARRI, the cinema-camera maker behind countless Hollywood productions, to help it look the part.
Editor
Aiman Hakim chevron_right
Table of Contents
What Honor actually launched
Honor first showed the Robot Phone as a concept at MWC earlier this year, with no price and no confirmed camera partner attached to it. That has now changed. Honor opened pre-orders on 12 August, with a full launch in China on 18 August, per Honor's own announcement. The headline feature is a small mechanical gimbal that extends out of a camera arm, which Honor says is about 65% smaller than the DJI Osmo Pocket series. Inside sits a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Honor's own H1 imaging chip, a 200MP main camera on a large 1/1.28-inch sensor, and a 7,060mAh battery.
It is not cheap. The two versions are priced at RMB 9,999 and RMB 12,999, which works out to roughly US$1,485 and US$1,930, as 9to5Google reports. For now it is a China-first device and is not being sold in the United States.
The ARRI part is the real story
Plenty of phone makers have borrowed a camera brand's name for the box. The Honor and ARRI tie-up reaches into the parts creators actually use after the shoot, and it is now tied to a shipping phone rather than left as a vague promise. According to Newsshooter, the phone records in ARRI's LogC3 format, works in the ARRI Wide Gamut 3 colour space, and ships with ARRI Looks colour presets, alongside a cinema mode meant to mimic the look of footage from a proper ARRI camera.
That matters because a flat log profile and a shared colour space are what let phone clips sit next to real cinema footage on one timeline without fighting each other in the grade. It is a feature aimed at people who edit, not only people who post.
@productnationco
What it means for Malaysian creators
The Robot Phone is not on sale in Malaysia and Honor has not announced local pricing, so this is a signal rather than a shopping tip. The signal is clear: the pocket cinema kit Malaysian videographers buy separately is being pulled into the phone. Right now the go-to is the DJI Osmo Pocket 3, which sells here for around RM1,799 after dropping from an RM2,299 launch price, as we covered in our look at the pocket-camera fight, or a 360 rig like the Insta360 X6.
The honest caveat is physics. A gimbal folded into a phone is tiny, so it will not fully replace a dedicated stabiliser for fast, run-and-gun work, and one Chinese launch tells us nothing about a Malaysian price. But the direction of travel is worth watching for anyone weighing up whether their next camera should be a camera at all.
It is also a reminder that the shot matters more than the badge on the lens. One of our own clips, a music video recreated entirely on a phone, pulled 18,018 views against a previous best of 224, with no ARRI logo anywhere near it. That craft is what our Pocket Cinematic course is built around.
Treat the Robot Phone as proof that the gap between a phone and a cinema camera keeps narrowing. If it reaches Malaysia at a sane price, the maths on buying a separate pocket camera changes.
Cover and gimbal image courtesy of Kota Ogi and editing image courtesy of Peter Stumpf on Unsplash.
