Camera upgrades and faster performance may be the brunt of what makes a phone “new” these days, but if you’ve ever glanced down at your mobile and wondered “what next”, you might want to see what Honor is dabbling in at Mobile World Congress.
New gear is on the way, and while some of it is expected — such as slick new foldables and tablets to keep you busy — at least one device comes with a little more going on than simply calls, cameras, and cutting edge tech.
The idea is a phone that has enough AI inside to let it understand the world.
Officially called the “Robot Phone”, the concept is a mobile that can understand what’s happening thanks in part to a combination of artificial intelligence, as well as a camera system that can pop up and use a gimbal to track things.
The Honor Robot Phone isn’t a real robot per se, not in the way LG’s robotics division showed was possible earlier in the year at CES, or even how countless other companies are working on for robots in the home or work. Rather, it’s a phone that aims to be able to understand the world, and even to a degree be left on a surface, tracking you for content creation and the like.
We’re still not entirely sure what Honor is driving at with a Robot Phone, beyond the device being another mobile with AI inside. But if you wanted to know what’s next for phones, apparently it could involve semi-autonomous mobiles.
Before that arrives, Honor has a new foldable coming in the Magic V6, a follow-up to the Magic V5 introduced when Honour arrived locally.
The new model sees a slim 8.75mm closed thickness roughly the same thickness as an iPhone 17 Pro Max, with a massive 6600 mAh silicon carbon battery, plus a combination of screens covering 6.52 inches on the cover and just under 8 inches when unfolded (7.95 inches).
It’ll even feature similar processing power to what’s inside both the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, offering the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
There are also tablets and laptops, or at least one of each, with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5-powered 12.3 inch MagicPad 4, arriving with a 3K OLED screen and a 4.8mm thickness, a size that seems poised to take on the Apple iPad Pro, out-thinning even that model’s 5.1mm thickness.
And there’s also a laptop in the MagicBook Pro 14, a somewhat obvious 14 inch laptop with Intel Core Ultra 3 processors.
One thing is missing in action on all of these, and that’s pricing. Right now, Honor hasn’t pointed out how much these will be, though it has said the Magic V6 foldable will be available in the second half of the year, while the MagicPad is likely later on, as well.
Oh, and as for that Robot Phone, it is likely to be very much a concept, so we might have to wait a little longer to see what our new robot overlords look like in a phone you can bring home.
