Honor Revisits an Old Path in Its Bold Bid to Replace DJI Pocket 3

Rumors have been swirling that DJI decided to launch a surprise price cut for its Pocket 3 on October 9 after noticing that major smartphone makers like OPPO and vivo were eyeing the gimbal camera market. Whether that’s true or not remains unclear—but the real challenger to DJI has finally stepped forward. And surprisingly, it’s not OPPO or vivo. It’s Honor.

On October 15, what began as a routine Magic 8 series launch suddenly took an unexpected turn. Honor dropped a dramatic “One More Thing”: the Robot Phone, a concept smartphone equipped with a gimbal-style robotic camera.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a commercial product yet—it’s still in concept form and is expected to make its official debut at MWC 2026 in Barcelona. With its futuristic design and imaginative ideas, it’s hard to say how much of what Honor teased will actually reach mass production. But one thing’s for sure—the Robot Phone has given DJI a reason to feel a little uneasy.

A “Rebel” Smartphone

Honor defines the Robot Phone as “a new species combining an AI brain with a robotic body.” According to the company, it’s designed to perceive the world intelligently, move like a machine, and act as your personal cameraman, capturing life’s most precious moments on its own.

Forget the futuristic marketing buzzwords—what really matters here is its core function: a mechanical gimbal camera that flips from back to front. The design clearly pays tribute to the DJI Pocket 3.

The phone’s rear camera is attached to a mechanical arm hidden inside the main camera housing. When activated, a sliding glass panel moves aside and the camera flips forward in a graceful backflip motion—transforming into a front-facing gimbal module.

In Honor’s demo video, the camera “peeks” out of a shirt pocket like a tiny robot head, observing the world. This showcases its automatic tracking ability—detecting and following people smoothly whether they’re walking or turning, mimicking professional-grade tracking like DJI’s ActiveTrack.

Honor also teased scenes of the camera capturing extreme sports such as skydiving, hinting at strong stabilization and adaptability in challenging environments. It even showed AI-assisted use cases—like helping users choose outfits while projecting “DRESS CODE” suggestions on the screen—fusing imaging with intelligent interaction.

When stripped of the AI storytelling, the essence becomes clear: Honor is directly challenging the DJI Pocket 3. Both products focus on compact, integrated gimbal cameras capable of smart tracking and hands-free filming—perfect for vloggers and solo creators.

The “Built-In Pocket 3”

Essentially, the Robot Phone is like a smartphone with a DJI Pocket 3 built inside. The concept merges the flexibility of a mechanical gimbal with AI-driven subject tracking—giving users a stabilized, autonomous shooting experience without carrying extra gear.

Honor’s strategy goes beyond competing product-to-product—it aims to replace the category itself. Instead of battling DJI on gimbal specs, Honor wants to make standalone gimbal cameras obsolete. It’s the same logic that allowed smartphones to replace compact cameras a decade ago—not by instantly matching image quality, but by being good enough and always with you.

Still, DJI probably isn’t losing sleep just yet—and that calmness comes from Honor’s own challenges.

Reality Bites

As exciting as the concept sounds, the engineering reality behind the Robot Phone is incredibly demanding. This isn’t Honor’s first flirtation with mechanical cameras. Back in 2015, it launched the Honor 7i, a phone with a flip-up rear camera that doubled as the front camera—an innovative but short-lived idea.

The Honor 7i delivered better selfies by using its 13MP main sensor up front, a major improvement over the 2MP and 8MP selfie cameras of its era. But its rotating mechanism took up precious internal space, forcing compromises on battery size and sensor quality. As smartphone sensors grew larger and power demands increased, such mechanical designs quickly became impractical.

A decade later, the same concerns remain—only magnified. Today’s phones must be thinner, cooler, and more power-efficient, yet also house massive camera modules, large batteries, and advanced cooling systems.

The Robot Phone’s complex flipping and rotating mechanism demands significant internal volume, cutting into battery and thermal space. Its motors, gears, and cables will face durability, dustproofing, and heat management challenges. To make the gimbal light enough to move swiftly, the camera module might have to use a smaller sensor—creating a paradox: a sophisticated gimbal system with only average image quality.

Meanwhile, DJI’s Pocket 3 remains a professional tool, offering 10-bit D-Log M, HLG HDR, and a mature video pipeline far beyond current smartphone capabilities. Even compared to leading camera phones like the iPhone or vivo’s X series, Honor still has ground to cover.

Innovation Still Deserves Applause

Realistically, the Honor Robot Phone is unlikely to be a mass-market hit or a direct Pocket 3 killer. It may not even make it past the concept stage. But perhaps that’s not the point.

Honor describes it as part of its “Alpha Strategy”—an experimental platform for future innovation. Even if the production model drops the mechanical gimbal or ends up simplified, the boldness of the concept alone is refreshing.

The smartphone industry has grown stagnant with incremental upgrades and copycat designs. Honor’s willingness to explore new form factors—no matter how impractical—is commendable. After all, Xiaomi’s “pointless” secondary screen on the 17 Pro series ended up selling over a million units. Sometimes, what seems unnecessary today sparks tomorrow’s trend.

So even if the Robot Phone ends up tripping over its own ambition, it still deserves applause for daring to dream differently. At the very least, Honor has managed to do what few brands dare anymore—bring genuine excitement back to smartphones.