[Jamie Cooper, Sales Director, UK and Ireland, Honor, opening Honor Robot Phone]
[Robot arm with camera extending from phone]
[Cooper talking to phone]
[Camera flipping over]
[Cooper talking to phone]
[Phone responding to Cooper]
Jamie Cooper (interview): “This is the Honor Robot Phone. It is a completely new innovation in terms of the smartphone category, and at the core of the offering for the consumer is a three-axis gimbal which is fully integrated into the smartphone.”
[Cooper on video call with colleague, camera tracking him as he moves around]
Jamie Cooper (interview): “What I love about it is that it actually tracks using AI. So it has a contextual understanding. It uses multimodal tracking for AI. It tracks the user and a center person or the center focal point of a person. And it can kind of follow you around the room as well. So, let’s say, for example, you’re cooking. You want to phone your family. And you’re pottering around the kitchen, as an example. It’s one of those things that can just track. And you have and keep the conversation going and keep connected with people as well, so that’s something that’s very interesting in terms of a use case of the device.”
[Honor employee using Robot Phone to film Cooper playing table tennis]
Jamie Cooper (interview): “It’s a step into what Honor are trying to do in terms of the business. It’s not just an entirely new category. It’s almost a being in its own. And I think the forefront of where this becomes quite interesting is that it pivots a camera from just being a passive device to a more proactive device. So in this world of AI and agentic AI, when devices start understanding the world around us and the surroundings, imagine having a device longer term which can understand and contextualize what’s in front of you. And then it will be able to give you assistance and support in the future.”
[Ben Wood, Chief Marketing Officer, FDM CCS Insight, looking at a phone]
Ben Wood (interview): “Honor has now officially launched the robot phone and it’s a very important product for them because it’s a super-premium product and it is highly differentiated from many of the other similar smartphones that exist in the marketplace. And for Honor, who are massively challenged by the dominance of companies like Apple and Samsung in the European market in particular, they need something different to stand out from the crowd.”
[Wood looking at phone]
Ben Wood (interview): “There have been huge hikes in the cost of memory, and that has meant that the prices of devices have rocketed. For smartphones, that means we’ve seen a significant slowdown in the marketplace, and we expect this year for the overall market to be down about 12%. Even in the second quarter of this year, we recorded a 7% decline year on year. What does that mean for these new devices? Well, in some respects, the premium tier has been a little bit more isolated from the lower tiers, where the impact of the extra cost has been much more significant. But needless to say, although people are considering more premium devices, they will probably hold onto them longer than they have done in the past.”
[Table tennis game and woman filming with Robot Phone]
[Robot Phone camera following action]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.