Samsung’s One UI 9 puts warranty checks, diagnostics, repair estimates, and service booking in Settings on the latest Galaxy foldables.
The post Samsung One UI 9 Puts Warranty Checks and Repair Support Right in Settings appeared first on TechRepublic.
Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 take different approaches to productivity, portability, durability, and everyday use.
The post Pixel 11 Pro Fold vs. Galaxy Z Fold8: Which $1,900 Foldable Is Better for Work? appeared first on TechRepublic.
Apple’s foldable iPhone Ultra could bring a 7.8-inch display, dual 48MP cameras, new iOS 27 layouts, and pricing around $2,000. Here’s what we know so far.
The post Apple iPhone Ultra: Price, Features, and What We Know So Far appeared first on TechRepublic.
I have a friend who still uses an iPhone 13 mini held together by a case and pure spite, and every single time a new iPhone launches, she asks me the same question. Is it small yet. It never is. Apple has spent years telling us, implicitly, that small phones do not sell, that the market has spoken, that everyone wants a bigger canvas for videos and games and doomscrolling. Fine, sure, the sales numbers backed that up in 2023. But sales numbers do not mean the desire disappeared, they mean the alternative was not good enough to fight for.
Which brings me to the iPhone Ultra, Apple’s rumored first foldable, expected to close into a short, squat, almost passport-shaped little brick before you unfold it into something the size of an iPad mini. That folded shape is the closest thing to mini energy Apple has shown in years, and it is buried inside a two thousand dollar folding phone nobody asked to be the delivery method. My friend does not want an iPad mini that folds. She wants her 13 mini, but new. Apple already built the shape. It just built it around the wrong phone.
Designer: Apple
The Air existed to answer a question almost nobody was asking at checkout, namely how thin can a phone get before the internals start filing complaints. It was a genuine engineering flex, the kind of thing that looks incredible in a teardown video and slightly pointless in daily use. I understood what it was trying to prove. I just never needed it proven to me personally, and I doubt I was alone in that.
The Ultra is rumored to repeat that exact flex, except this time the thinness gets folded in half, closing down to somewhere between 9 and 9.5mm shut and reportedly as thin as 4.5mm open, according to recent leaks. That is a genuinely wild number for a phone with a hinge in it. Apple is once again proving it can do the hard, borderline unnecessary engineering thing. The difference is that this time, buried inside that flex, is an actual shape people have been begging for since 2023. Apple just does not seem to have noticed it yet.
Go back and look at what the 13 mini actually was for a second, because I think people forget how unremarkable the compromise really was. It measured 131.5mm tall, 64.2mm wide, weighed 141 grams, and ran the exact same A15 chip as the standard 13. You gave up battery life and screen real estate. You did not give up the flagship experience shrunk down to fit an actual hand. Compare that to where the standard iPhone lineup sits today, regularly north of 6.1 inches before you even get to Pro Max territory, and the gap the mini used to fill has only gotten wider and lonelier.
Now put the Ultra’s folded footprint next to that. Reports point to a 5.5 inch cover display when shut, in a short, wide, passport style shell that is about as close to mini adjacent proportions as Apple has shipped since the mini died. The catch is that this compact shell only exists as a doorway into a 7.8 inch, 4:3 inner screen and a starting price rumored to land somewhere between 1,999 and 2,499 dollars. Nobody buying that phone is buying it to have something small in their pocket. They are buying an iPad mini that happens to fold shut, which is a completely different pitch than the one my friend has been asking me about for three years running.
There has been some loose speculation, mostly a 9to5Mac piece from last year, that Apple’s new staggered launch schedule could theoretically clear a runway for a smaller phone somewhere down the line. Even that piece called the odds slim to none, and nothing currently on Apple’s roadmap for the 18, 18e, 18 Pro, or Ultra includes a mini in any form. Samsung, for what it is worth, has stuck with its Z Flip clamshell as its own answer to compact, so the appetite for small has not vanished industry wide, it has just gone unanswered on Apple’s side of the fence for a while now.
So here is the pitch, and it is not a complicated one. Apple has now proven twice, once with the Air and once with the Ultra’s folded shell, that it can engineer real compactness without breaking anything important. Skip the fold. Skip the tablet trapped inside a phone shaped envelope. Take that exact short, wide, passport sized footprint and wrap a single, non folding screen around it, call it a mini, and ship it. Apple does not need a new idea here. It already built one. It just keeps hiding it inside features nobody was asking it to attach to.
The post Apple is Building a Short, Wide iPhone Ultra… Now It Owes Us an Actual iPhone Mini first appeared on Yanko Design.
Google’s new Android verification flow adds a 24-hour wait for apps from unverified developers as broader identity checks approach.
The post Google Tightens Android Sideloading: Unverified Apps Now Face a 24-Hour Wait appeared first on TechRepublic.
Samsung will unveil a new Galaxy S26 device Aug. 27, with leaks pointing to the Galaxy S26 FE, a $799 price and several flagship features.
The post Samsung Galaxy S26 FE: The Next Phone Reveal Is Almost Here appeared first on TechRepublic.
A macOS Tahoe 26.7 leak reveals unreleased Apple hardware, including new Macs, iPads, AirPods, smart-home devices, and Vision products.
The post Apple’s macOS Leak Reveals a Much Bigger Hardware Roadmap Than Expected appeared first on TechRepublic.
At the same $1,099 starting price, Google and Apple split on camera reach, AI, pro video tools, update commitments, and ecosystem fit.
The post Pixel 11 Pro vs iPhone 17 Pro: What $1,099 Gets You appeared first on TechRepublic.
Google Play Points members may find Pixel 11 discounts worth more than $100. Here’s how to check your account and what to know before buying.
The post Google Pixel 11 Discount: Eligible Buyers Could Save Up to $175 appeared first on TechRepublic.
Android phones can now power real desktop-style setups, but supported desktop modes and extreme hardware mods are very different beasts.
The post Turn an Android Phone Into a Desktop PC: What Actually Works appeared first on TechRepublic.
OnePlus 16 leaks point to a 9,000mAh battery, 200MP camera, 185Hz display, and new Snapdragon chip, though most specs remain unconfirmed.
The post OnePlus 16 Details Leak: 9,000mAh Battery Could Be Its Biggest Upgrade appeared first on TechRepublic.
Samsung may be preparing a return to full-size wireless headphones with a device reportedly known as Galaxy H1. App code offers the first clues, but key details remain unconfirmed.
The post Samsung Galaxy H1 Leak Points to New Over-Ear Headphones: What We Know appeared first on TechRepublic.
The Camon 50 Ultra 5G feels like Tecno looked at the current AI phone race, skipped the walled garden nonsense, and built the first assistant experience that actually shows you why you’d want to use it in the first place.
Apple has Apple Intelligence. Google Pixel has Gemini. Samsung has Galaxy AI. Tecno has everything else. Packed into its EllaClaw agent is the ability to use Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek, because a walled garden never benefited anyone. Tecno’s Camon 50 Ultra 5G is a great phone, but what makes it worth doing a double take for is EllaClaw, an agentic AI built into the phone that offers a phone AI experience I have yet to see on any smartphone so far. EllaClaw is currently an invite-only closed Beta feature limited to just this phone, but seeing it in action gave me everything I needed to understand where other phones are going wrong with their on-board AI, and where they can learn from Tecno.
The wild part is how approachable it all feels. EllaClaw does not sit around waiting for you to guess the perfect command like some moody genie. It actively shows you what it can do, which makes the whole experience feel far less intimidating than Gemini or Apple Intelligence currently do. Within minutes, I was jumping between message summaries, creative tools, settings help, and different AI models without feeling like I needed a tutorial or a prayer.
The moment I unboxed the Camon 50 Ultra 5G, I was hit with a serious case of déjà vu. The green variant has a gorgeous satin finish that gives it a silky, metallic glow under the light, and it immediately sent me down a memory lane trip to my old OnePlus 8 Pro which I faithfully used from 2020 to 2024. The color, the texture, even the way the camera module is arranged, it all felt so familiar and, frankly, so premium. Tecno absolutely nailed the flagship-esque feel here. The back is smooth to the touch, resists fingerprints reasonably well, and has a subtle elegance that a lot of phones in this bracket just do not bother with.
The front is where the design language gets a little more complicated, at least for me. Tecno went with a waterfall display, which means the screen curves dramatically around the sides. It looks stunning when the phone is off or when you are watching a video, creating an immersive, almost bezel-free experience. But I have always had a love-hate relationship with these displays. They are beautiful, no doubt, but they can be a magnet for accidental palm touches. While the software does its best to ignore them, I still found myself occasionally tapping something I did not mean to. It is a classic case of striking aesthetics meeting the messy reality of how we hold our phones. I do have to say that Tecno’s Liquid Glass homage does look much better on a waterfall display than on a bezel-ridden iPhone.
That waterfall display has a big effect on how the phone feels in your hand. The curved edges melt away into the frame, making the Camon 50 Ultra 5G incredibly comfortable to hold. There are no sharp, flat corners digging into your palm, which is great for long sessions of scrolling or gaming. The trade-off, of course, is that the phone can feel a little slippery if you are not paying attention. It has that smooth, polished-stone feel that is lovely to touch but always feels one careless gesture away from a gravity experiment. It is a phone that practically begs to be put in a case, even if it feels like a shame to cover up the design.
The button layout is personally feels a little little bit tricky. On the left, you have a dedicated AI key that summons EllaClaw, a shortcut I ended up using constantly. You can remap it, but having a one-press gateway to the AI is a smart touch. The right side, however, is where my muscle memory started to complain. There is a power button and a fairly short, single-piece volume rocker. Because the rocker is slightly compact, I often found myself fumbling, unsure if my thumb was on volume up, down, or about to lock the screen. It is a small pain, but a tiny indent in the middle of the volume button would have made all the difference. The buttons themselves are slightly sharp and textured, a necessary choice for a phone with curved edges, but it does not quite solve the problem of telling them apart by feel alone.
EllaClaw is where the Camon 50 Ultra 5G earns its stripes. The dashboard (which you access by swiping towards the left – where you’d see Google Discover on most Android phones) keeps surfacing prompts, shortcuts, and suggestions, making the AI feel alive and accessible rather than buried under three layers of settings. Most phone AI treats users like they should already know what they want. EllaClaw meets you halfway, and that changes everything about how you interact with the phone.
The deeper layer, EllaClaw Pro, is genuinely impressive. It reaches into the phone’s apps and system functions in a way that feels ahead of where the conversation currently is. I asked it to summarize my text messages without opening the messages app, and it did exactly that, handling the whole thing on its own. That kind of agentic behavior is the next logical step for phone assistants, and right now, Tecno seems to be ahead of the pack. Nothing reassured me that the AI wasn’t reading my messages to enhance its database though, so the privacy conscious might have a thing or two to worry about.
Tecno’s decision to build EllaClaw as a multi-model hub is one of the smartest software calls I have seen this year. My unit offered access to DeepSeek, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and Meta AI alongside Ella’s own model, all in one dashboard. Claude is conspicuously missing, but everything else is here and free to use (at least during the Beta period). Daily limits are applied on AI use which reset every 24 hours, and you can buy extra credits in case you overshoot. In all my hours of testing, I never needed to purchase extra credits, which means image generation, video generation, and sketch-to-photo tools were all available at no additional cost.
EllaClaw is still being refined, though. The dashboard lagged occasionally, and the AI sometimes took longer to load than felt comfortable. Restarting the app always sorted it out, but it is a reminder that this experience has not fully grown into its ambition yet. Users in certain regions may also need a VPN to get the full experience running, which is worth knowing upfront.
The camera system is built around a 50MP Sony LYT-700C main sensor with OIS, paired with a 50MP telephoto lens offering 3x optical zoom (70mm equivalent) and an 8MP ultrawide. That telephoto is a proper standout for a phone at this price point, and the software leans into it with confidence. You get 60x hybrid zoom, which is mostly digital exaggeration past the 3x mark, but the results between 3x and 10x are still usable in decent light. The main camera performs well across a range of scenarios, especially in good light, and night mode is aggressive without getting too soupy. The front camera is a 50MP sensor with autofocus, which makes a noticeable difference in selfie sharpness compared to the fixed-focus cameras on cheaper phones.
Tecno stuffs the camera app with modes including dual-cam, underwater mode, document scanning, super night mode, and super macro. FlashSnap is the standout, though. It watches your scene and captures the most dramatic moment automatically, so if someone is mid-jump or mid-throw, the phone clicks at exactly the right time without you having to think about it. It made me look like a considerably better photographer than I actually am. Video recording tops out at 4K at 30fps, which is fine but not particularly exciting.
Battery life is one of the phone’s most quietly satisfying qualities. The 6500mAh cell pushed comfortably through two full days of use without needing a charge, which is more than my current flagship iPhone manages. At some point I just stopped thinking about charging altogether, which is the best thing a battery can do. The phone supports 45W wired charging, which is fast enough to feel civilized without being record-breaking.
The display is a 6.78-inch AMOLED panel with a 1.5K resolution (1208 x 2644 pixels, 429 ppi) and a 144Hz refresh rate with LTPO support for adaptive refresh. It is vibrant, sharp, and performs well in low light. The 144Hz refresh makes scrolling and gaming feel smooth, and the high PWM dimming (2160Hz) helps reduce flicker for those sensitive to it. The curved waterfall edges are a design choice I have already aired my reservations about, and this section will not relitigate that argument. It looks great. It catches accidental touches. Moving on.
Speakers are a weak spot, and a noticeable one. There is a single grille at the bottom right, so stereo is off the table, and the audio leans tinny with very little bass to speak of. For a phone this polished everywhere else, it feels like a department that got the budget cut.
Gaming held up well for everything I tried. Tecno’s dedicated gaming software manages frame rates and battery draw sensibly, and the Dimensity 7400 handled casual to moderate sessions without complaint. The 144Hz display helps make fast-paced games feel responsive, and the phone stayed well within comfortable temperature ranges throughout. Nothing I played caused any real issues, thermal throttling never became a concern, and the large battery meant I could game for extended sessions without nervously watching the percentage drop.
Tecno is promising 3 years of Android OS upgrades and 5 years of security patches for the Camon 50 Ultra 5G, which puts it roughly in line with brands like Motorola and slightly ahead of OnePlus, though still behind Nothing’s 6-year security support.That is a meaningful commitment for a phone at this price, especially if you are someone who plans to use the device well beyond the usual two-year upgrade cycle.
Tecno also claims the battery is built for durability, marketing it as a “5-Year Durability Battery” with TÜV certification and a 72-month lag-free guarantee. Whether that holds true in practice is something only time will tell, but the fact that the company is willing to stake that claim suggests they are at least thinking about longevity beyond the usual marketing fluff. The 6500mAh capacity itself helps, because the less frequently you need to charge, the slower the battery degrades. If you are getting two full days of use out of a charge right now, that headroom means the phone should still feel usable years down the line when the cell inevitably loses some of its capacity.
The Tecno Camon 50 Ultra 5G is priced at $420 for the 8GB + 256GB variant (that’s based on its ₹40,000 Indian price, since the phone hasn’t officially launched in the US). For a phone with a 50MP telephoto, a 144Hz AMOLED display, and a 6500mAh battery, that positioning feels competitive in the under-40K segment, especially when you factor in the AI ambitions.
What feels less competitive is the setup experience. When I powered on the phone and began the initial configuration, India was not listed in the countries menu. Hilariously enough, Palestine was available as an option. The world’s most populated country, nowhere on the list. I eventually had to select a different region just to proceed, which immediately felt awkward for a phone launching in India. Later, I also needed a VPN to access EllaClaw, which could have been a software issue tied to my initial region selection, or it could point to broader availability constraints. Obviously this won’t be the case for everyone since mine was a review unit with the EllaClaw beta program probably tied to a certain region. Either way, it is a frustrating first impression for a feature that is supposed to be the phone’s main selling point.
As for EllaClaw Pro and its credits system, Tecno does offer a credit-based structure for premium AI features like image generation and video creation. In my testing, I never hit a paywall or needed to purchase add-on credits, which suggests the included allocation is generous enough for typical use, at least initially. How sustainable that remains over time, or whether Tecno tightens the limits later, is harder to predict. For now, though, the experience feels surprisingly open, which is a rare thing in the AI phone space.
The Tecno Camon 50 Ultra 5G delivers a lot of value for $420. The camera is genuinely impressive, with super night mode shots and 60x zoom that feel bonkers for this price range, and the battery life makes it easy to forget about charging anxiety for days at a time. But I am not recommending this phone for its camera, or its battery, or even its design, as much as I enjoyed all of those things. I am recommending it for EllaClaw, because it is the closest I have come to using a phone AI that feels like it was built for actual humans.
EllaClaw is everything Gemini and Apple Intelligence hope to achieve, and a bit more. I did not think I would see a phone that lets me choose the LLM for its AI assistant, swapping between models depending on what I need. I definitely did not expect an AI assistant dashboard to genuinely give me so much insight and value into how I can use the AI, rather than just sitting through a keynote, nodding along to feature lists, and then forgetting half of them the moment I leave the room. Tecno has cracked something here that bigger brands are still struggling with, which is making AI feel approachable, integrated, and genuinely useful instead of intimidating or buried.
The phone has a few tiny flaws that feel manageable if you’re more driven by the AI chops. The speakers are tinny, the curved display catches palm touches, EllaClaw occasionally lags, and the setup process was a bit of a hassle given I needed a VPN to get EllaClaw to work (but that’s just my China-bound review unit). But if you are looking for a phone that shows you what AI on mobile should feel like when it grows up, the Camon 50 Ultra 5G is worth your attention. It is not perfect, but it is ambitious in all the right ways. Google, Apple, and Samsung could surely take notes.
The post Tecno Camon 50 Ultra 5G Review: A $420 AI Phone With Built-in Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Grok first appeared on Yanko Design.
The Pixel 11 lineup arrived this week with a genuinely great redesign. The camera bar is 40 percent thinner, the glass runs edge to edge, and for the first time in a while a Pixel actually looks like it evolved instead of just got a new coat of paint. And then there’s HiLight, the one piece of new hardware Google actually wants you to talk about. A small LED cluster tucked into the corner of that same camera bar, ready to glow when Gemini is thinking or when someone you love is calling.
It is, in essence, Google finally admitting it missed the old Nexus notification LED and bringing it back. Five colors, a glow for Gemini, a glow for your favorite caller, and that’s the whole feature list on day one. Nothing to complain about here, except that Nothing exists. The London phone brand has spent years turning its own version of this idea into an actual playground, mini-games, custom widgets, an SDK anyone can build on. Google clearly has the engineering muscle to do something just as ambitious with HiLight down the line. It just chose not to, at least not yet.
Designer: Google
Before we get into that though, credit where it’s due. Hold a Pixel 11 next to a Pixel 10 and the difference is immediate, not the kind that only shows up in marketing photos. The bar sits almost flush now, and Google’s claim that it’s basically bumpless with a case on actually checks out in person. Under that glass, Tensor G6 lands on a 2nm node, Google’s first, promising 25 percent faster browsing, 15 percent quicker app launches, and on-device AI running up to 3.5 times faster while using less power. The Pixel 11 gets a new 48MP main sensor with 56 percent more light sensitivity and a telephoto stretching to 30x Super Zoom. This is a very complete phone before you even get to the Pro models.
The Pro and Pro XL push further with a 50MP main sensor, a redesigned 48MP telephoto, Portrait Mode at 5x, and 120x Pro Zoom, sitting under a 3,600-nit display that Google claims is twice as scratch resistant as last year’s. Titan M3 adds quantum-safe boot security on top. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold deserves its own mention here too. It shed almost 10 percent of its weight and a millimeter of thickness, down to 10.1mm closed, while Google claims triple the durability thanks to a redesigned gearless hinge. The crease is genuinely harder to spot than last year’s, and the whole thing folds flat enough to stop feeling like a novelty. If you told me a year ago Google would have the most convincing foldable in its own lineup, I would not have believed you.
Now, the part everyone will bring up regardless of how the rest of this goes: RAM. The Pro and Pro XL start at 12GB in their base 256GB configs, down from 16GB last year, and Google is blaming this on a supplier RAM shortage hitting the entire industry. Memory manufacturers have been shifting production capacity toward AI server chips, and consumer RAM and NAND prices have spiked hard enough this year that people are half-jokingly calling it RAMageddon. It is a real problem, and Google is far from the only phone maker feeling it. Storage doubling to 256GB as a base softens the blow a little, but a $100 price bump alongside a RAM cut is still a hard sell. Fair enough on the supply chain excuse. Less fair asking Pro buyers to pay more for less unless they climb a storage tier.
Back to HiLight, because it deserves the real estate. That LED cluster sits right where the temperature sensor used to live on older Pixels, which is a strange trade to make for something this limited. Google’s official pitch is that HiLight keeps you informed without the distraction of staring at a screen, which is a very polished way of saying there weren’t enough ideas to fill the space. Glowing when Gemini talks and flashing a color for favorite callers is a fine start, not an entire feature. Compare that to what’s happening across the pond. Nothing’s Glyph Matrix on the Phone (3) packs 489 individually lit LEDs into what functions as a tiny secondary screen, complete with an open SDK that lets anyone build their own widgets and games. People made a working ball maze. A tilt-controlled Magic 8 Ball. A contact dialer you can use without touching the main display. None of it is essential, but all of it is fun, and fun counts for something when you’re asking someone to pay a premium for a light.
Google clearly has the horsepower for something bigger here. Tensor G6 alone proves the company isn’t short on engineering muscle, and the camera bar redesign shows the industrial design team knows exactly what it’s doing right now. HiLight feels like the output of a team that had a great idea, then stopped one meeting short of making it good. I want to see where this goes in a year or two, because the foundation Google just built, the hardware, the placement, even the name, is genuinely solid. It just needs an actual reason to exist beyond telling you Gemini is thinking.
The post The Pixel 11’s Coolest New Feature Is Actually 10 Years Old first appeared on Yanko Design.
After many teasers and demos, the Honor Robot Phone has finally and officially launched in China. It is also staying exclusive to the Chinese market for now, with Honor not planning an international release at this stage. That alone will make it a frustratingly out-of-reach device for many, because this is one of the rare smartphones that feels genuinely different at first glance.
Part of the reason the launch has drawn so much interest is that Honor first revealed the Robot Phone at MWC earlier this year, where it quickly became one of the event’s biggest conversation pieces. Even in a show packed with concept hardware and camera claims, this was the device that made people stop, stare, and ask how it actually worked. Now that it has moved from trade show reveal to commercial launch, the Robot Phone still feels just as unusual.
Designer: HONOR
Rather than chasing attention with another familiar camera bump or an incremental spec upgrade, Honor has built a robotic gimbal directly into the phone itself. The result is a camera system that can physically move, track, tilt, and stabilize in ways a conventional flagship simply cannot. After spending time with the device, it is clear the Robot Phone is not just trying to be another premium handset with a long feature list. It is trying to pitch a new idea for what a creator-focused smartphone can be.
The core pitch behind the Honor Robot Phone is easy to understand once you see it in person. Honor has integrated what it calls a 4DoF Titanium Agile Gimbal into the phone, effectively turning the camera into an active moving system rather than a static sensor setup. The company says the module is 65 percent smaller than traditional gimbal solutions while also offering a 200 percent increase in structural strength, allowing it to fit inside a premium smartphone body without turning the device into a bulky experiment.
That change in hardware philosophy is what makes the Robot Phone immediately stand out. In practice, the moving camera module is meant to deliver smoother stabilization and more dynamic motion than a normal smartphone can manage on its own. Honor is also building in multiple movement modes, including Tilt Lock, First Person View, FPV Vertical, and AI SpinShot, all of which are designed to make mobile footage look more deliberate and more cinematic.
The second half of the launch story is imaging. Honor says the Robot Phone is the first major product from its Cinematic Imaging Partnership with ARRI, bringing selected elements of ARRI Image Science and professional cinema workflow ideas into a smartphone. That includes ARRI LogC3 recording in ARRI CINEMA mode on the main gimbal camera, alongside ARRI Wide Gamut 3 and ARRI Looks.
On paper, the camera hardware is also extremely ambitious. The rear setup pairs a 200MP Agile Gimbal Main Camera with a 1/1.28-inch sensor and F1.6 aperture with a 200MP periscope telephoto camera using a 1/1.4-inch sensor and 2.7x optical zoom. A 50MP ultra-wide camera completes the setup. Honor is also claiming AI noise reduction improvements, up to 14 stops of dynamic range, and a video pipeline designed to preserve more usable information for post-production.
That is a lot of technical language, but the broader message is straightforward. Honor does not want the Robot Phone to be seen as a novelty. It wants this to be taken seriously as a compact filmmaking and creator tool.
The most striking thing about the Robot Phone in person is that its main feature is visible. So many smartphone launches revolve around internal improvements that are difficult to appreciate without extensive testing. Here, the big idea is immediately obvious. The camera module moves. It tracks. It gives the phone a sense of physical intention that most handsets simply do not have.
That makes the Robot Phone more memorable than most new flagships before you even get into image quality. Instead of relying entirely on software stabilization and fixed hardware, Honor is trying to introduce actual camera movement into the smartphone experience. In a short hands-on session, that makes the device feel less like a standard phone with a flashy camera and more like a compact production tool that happens to fit in your pocket.
The tracking and movement features are also easier to appreciate in person than they are on a spec sheet. AI Live-Tracking, gesture controls, and voice-directed movement all sound abstract on paper. Once you see the phone physically following a subject or repositioning itself, the concept becomes much easier to understand. Whether that turns into something essential in everyday use is a bigger question, but as a first impression, the idea lands more convincingly than I expected.
Using the on-screen virtual joystick, I was able to adjust the gimbal with surprising precision. The interface crams in a lot of features, so it does take some time to learn. Even so, the gimbal feels very responsive, which helps the controls feel more intuitive once you settle in.
Outside the headline camera hardware, Honor is still treating the Robot Phone like a proper premium device. It is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, backed by a custom cooling system that is meant to keep performance stable during longer recording sessions. There is also a 7060mAh silicon-carbon battery, with support for 120W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The rest of the hardware sounds suitably high-end too. Honor is using an all-metal unibody design paired with a 6.31-inch LTPO OLED display, an adaptive 1 to 120Hz refresh rate, and a claimed peak brightness of 6800 nits. On paper at least, this is not a concept phone built around one attention-grabbing trick. Honor is trying to package an experimental camera idea inside a full flagship experience.
For now, the Honor Robot Phone is launching only in China, where it might be staying indefinitely. Honor is not planning to release the device outside China at this stage, which means this unusually creator-focused phone is set to remain a domestic-market curiosity rather than a broader global play.
That is disappointing, because the Robot Phone feels like exactly the kind of launch the smartphone market needs more of. It may not be for everyone, and there are obvious questions about durability, long-term usefulness, and whether creators will trust a built-in robotic camera system over dedicated gear. Even so, it is difficult to dismiss because the concept is so easy to understand once you see it in action.
After a brief hands-on, my early take is that the Honor Robot Phone feels niche but genuinely fresh. The robotic gimbal is not just a visual gimmick for launch-day headlines. It changes the way the device presents itself, and potentially the way some people shoot with it. Whether that translates into a truly great camera phone will need more time to answer, but as a statement of intent, Honor has made one of the boldest smartphone moves of the year.
The bigger frustration is that, for now, it is a bold move that most of the world will only be able to watch from a distance. First teased at MWC earlier this year and now officially on sale in China for 9,999 yuan (roughly $1,483) for the 12GB+512GB variant and 12,999 yuan (around $1,928) for the 16GB+1TB variant, the Robot Phone is not about to become the next mainstream global flagship. Still, even as a limited-market release, it stands out as one of the most unusual and ambitious smartphones to arrive this year.
The post Honor Robot Phone Hands-on: Bold Phone With A Moving Camera Few Can Buy first appeared on Yanko Design.
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 leads record foldable preorders in the US and South Korea as more buyers move from Flip models to the larger Fold lineup before launch.
The post Samsung: New Galaxy Foldables Beat Previous Preorder Record by 30% appeared first on TechRepublic.
A new leak claims Honor’s Robot Phone will feature two 200MP cameras, a motorized gimbal, a 7,060mAh battery, and 120W charging.
The post Honor Robot Phone Specs Leak Ahead of Aug. 12 Debut: What Users Can Expect appeared first on TechRepublic.
Leaked Google Pixel 11 marketing materials suggest a new HiLight notification feature, while a five-minute charging claim raises questions ahead of Google's launch.
The post Google Pixel 11 Leak Reveals ‘HiLight’ Notification Feature, Raises Questions About Charging Claim appeared first on TechRepublic.
Motorola patented a smartwatch that could one day transform into a phone. See how it works, who might use it, and what could keep it from reaching stores.
The post Motorola Patents a Wearable that Could Transform From Watch to Phone appeared first on TechRepublic.
Samsung’s rumored Galaxy S27 Pro may share several premium features with the S27 Ultra, but new leaks suggest clear differences in zoom cameras, display size, S Pen support, batteries, and regional processors.
The post Samsung Galaxy S27 Pro May Not Be the Smaller Ultra Buyers Expect appeared first on TechRepublic.
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