The Phone That Got Legs: Honor Has Built a Humanoid Robot
After years of putting AI, cameras, and sensors into your pocket, Honor is giving all of that technology a body.
2026 Humanoid Robot Market Report
160 pages of exclusive insight from global robotics experts – uncover funding trends, technology challenges, leading manufacturers, supply chain shifts, and surveys and forecasts on future humanoid applications.
Featuring insights from
Aaron Saunders, Former CTO of
Boston Dynamics,
now Google DeepMind
2026 Humanoid Robot Market Report
160 pages of exclusive insight from global robotics experts – uncover funding trends, technology challenges, leading manufacturers, supply chain shifts, and surveys and forecasts on future humanoid applications.
On March 1 at MWC 2026 in Barcelona, the Chinese smartphone maker will unveil its first humanoid robot – becoming the first major phone brand to step into bipedal robotics. And the more you look at what goes into a modern smartphone – compact cameras, depth sensors, AI chips, battery density – the more the move makes sense. Honor has been refining all of this for years. It just happened to be inside a device that fits in your pocket.
What the Teaser Shows
Based on the teaser and early reports: approximately 160 cm tall, 80 kg, 20 degrees of freedom, five-fingered hands, a forehead-mounted camera, blue LED strips on head and chest, and an estimated price around $56,000. Top speed is listed at 4 km/h, with roughly 2 hours of battery life. None of this is officially confirmed yet.
A 39-second clip released February 23 shows a matte-black humanoid emerging from the shadows inside Honor’s “Alpha Lab.” The design is unmistakably consumer electronics – sleek and polished in a way factory-floor robots never are.
Your phone already has a brain, eyes, and a voice. Honor thinks it’s time to give it legs.
Why a Phone Company?
Look at what a humanoid robot needs, then look inside a flagship phone. Vision systems? Phones have been combining RGB cameras with depth sensors for years. On-device AI? Neural processing units built for real-time image recognition transfer directly. Power management? Battery density and thermal engineering are what phone makers do every day.
Honor has spent years optimizing all of this to fit inside a 7mm slab of glass. Scaling it up to a walking humanoid is a different challenge, but the technology stack is remarkably similar. That’s the real story here — not just that a phone company is building a robot, but that it might actually be well-equipped to do so.
Skill Score
The Honor robot currently scores 6 out of 10 on the Humanoid.guide Skill Score. Navigation gets a 2 — Honor has never built anything that walks, and the teaser only shows a controlled lab. Manipulation gets a 4 — basic grasping with two degrees of freedom per finger, but not the dexterity of competitors like Figure 03 or Agility Digit. The score is provisional and will be updated after the reveal.
What’s on Stage March 1
The robot shares the keynote (1 PM CET) with the Honor Robot Phone – a smartphone with a gimbal-mounted robotic camera arm – and the Honor Magic V6 foldable. Phone, robot phone, humanoid robot. Honor is showing the whole spectrum at once.
The big questions for March 1: Does it walk convincingly outside a lab? Is this a product with a ship date or a concept showcase? And can the YOYO AI assistant tie the phone and robot ecosystem together?
The leap from phone to robot sounds dramatic. Break it down to cameras, chips, and batteries, and it starts to look like a logical next step. Whether Honor can actually execute is what we’ll find out on Saturday.
This article will be updated after Honor’s MWC 2026 keynote on March 1, 2026.
