---
title: 'Honor Robot Phone Teardown: Inside the Phone with a Robot Arm'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=EnWmuc-J8i8'
video_id: 'EnWmuc-J8i8'
date: 2026-09-12
duration_sec: 810
channel: 'JerryRigEverything'
---

# Honor Robot Phone Teardown: Inside the Phone with a Robot Arm

> Source: [Honor Robot Phone Teardown: Inside the Phone with a Robot Arm](https://youtube.com/watch?v=EnWmuc-J8i8)

## Summary

The Honor Robot phone is a unique device featuring a robot arm with a 200-megapixel stabilized gimbal camera. This teardown explores its durability, internal components, and engineering design.

### Key Points

- **Unique Design** [00:00] — The Honor Robot phone features a robot arm with a 200-megapixel stabilized gimbal camera that pops out of the back panel.
- **Unboxing and Price** [00:39] — The phone comes with a SIM tool, rubberized case, lanyard, USB-C cable, and a 120-watt charging brick, priced at around $1,500.
- **Robot Arm Functionality** [01:10] — The robot arm is quiet, with micro motors and titanium joints, and can track movements or be controlled remotely.
- **Motor Efficiency** [01:22] — Honor reduced motor size by 70% compared to other gimbal stabilizers, and the arm can detect when stuck and power down.
- **Internal Wiring** [08:49] — The teardown reveals braided wires for motorized actuator controls and camera sensor data, color-coded to actuators.
- **Battery and Charging** [09:42] — The battery is 7,015 mAh and charges at 120 watts, and is relatively easy to remove without taking off the screen.
- **Camera and Thermal Design** [12:25] — The camera unit is a standard smartphone camera with internal OIS, and the back housing has a milled heat sink with thermal paste.

## Transcript

Quirky phones are some of my favorites, and this Honor Robot phone is currently one of the quirkiest phones on the planet that's actually available to the public. In a world of boring slab phones, this guy has a robot arm that popped out of the back
panel like a flower in springtime, with a 200 megapixel stabilized gimbal camera up on top. Today we're going to find out if this Honor Robot phone is durable, and see if there's
any weak points, as well as we'll tear it open to see how it looks and works from the inside. You know the drill. Oops. Hopefully the sliding glass camera protector coming off is a feature and not a failure.
Inside their Honor Robot phone box, we get a SIM card removal tool, a rubberized protective phone case, a lanyard for some reason, a USB-C cable, and a 120-watt charging brick, all
coming in at a semi-reasonable price of around $1,500. For reference, Samsung's Fold 8 starts at $1,900, and that one doesn't even have a robot arm. Launching the arm for the first time, it is actually pretty quiet.
You can barely hear the super small micro motors swing around the titanium joints, which then allows the video camera to either track your movements, or you can use the remote control to tilt and flip the camera around.
Honor says they've reduced the motor size by 70% compared to other gimbal stabilizers. And while there is a substantial amount of torque for the camera itself, it moves really fast, it can also realize when it's stuck and immediately power down,
which is a good thing as to not overstress the motors and not damage human digits. For example, if I put my finger over top and try to erect the arm out of the back, it gives up pretty quick. And if it's laying flat on the table, I can retract the robot arm,
and it's strong enough to lift up the phone and tuck the arm underneath, but not fully retract back into its little home. If the arm is closed and I want to extend it out of the phone while still flat on its back, it's not strong enough to lift the phone out all by itself.
Probably for safety. One thing I did notice though is that even only being out of its box for about five minutes now, the motors and camera sensors are getting super toasty. I'm clocking in at around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, right there on the head of the camera.
Which makes sense. If you remember from the last decade's worth of smartphone teardowns here on my channel, smartphone manufacturers usually try to rest the camera sensors on top of vapor chambers, or place them near cooling systems,
because just like processors, the camera sensor is a generator of heat, and that heat needs to be dissipated. Since this 200 megapixel camera at the end of the arm is all by itself, there's not really any place for that heat to go except right back into the titanium arm.
Probably not a deal-breaker, but it is considerably more toasty than I was expecting. We'll see all of the internal cooling here in a second, I'm sure. If I close the glass window and then try to retract the camera arm, he kind of flips around, notices, and then just stares like he's kind of annoyed by the blockage,
which is kind of cute, not gonna lie. If I try to sacrifice my own fingers, you know, for science, the arm comes around and attempts to enter into its home, but gives up after a very weak attempt. It really doesn't feel like anything.
The motors are super gentle once they hit their limit as safe torque off and it good to know that no fingers will ever be damaged by being in the wrong place at the wrong time Thumbs up for that Moving down below the rear facing camera, now that it's facing the front, is Honor's
Nano Crystal Shield Cover Glass, all 6.3 inches of it. And since we start seeing very faint scratches at level 6, with deeper grooves at level 7,
I would put it on par with Corning's latest inventions, at least as far as scratch protection goes. The robot arm camera also has glass covering the lens, and then there's another underscreen 50 megapixel dedicated selfie camera if you don't want to whip out the robot.
The sides of the phone are made with ribbed aluminum, along with a metal power button and volume buttons, which are not removable. Making our way back to the robot arm, Honor says this guy is made with a lightweight titanium alloy,
which has some painted plastic access panels to hide the internal circuitry for the assembly. It feels super solid for how small it is. The protective window over the back glass is still definitely glass,
and the left side of the phone is pretty empty, except for three distinct antenna lines, which hopefully don't come back to bite us later. The bottom of the phone has our 120-watt supercharging USB-C 3.2 port,
along with a double-sided dual SIM card tray, which does have a red rubber ring to help with the IP54 water resistant rating. But there is no expandable storage. Making our way back to the other cameras on the back panel.
And yes, indeed, there are more cameras back here. The top left camera is a 50 megapixel wide-angle lens. Below that is a 200 megapixel periscope telephoto and a dual-tone LED flash over on the top right.
The 200 megapixel Agile Gimbal main camera on its 3-axis stabilizer also apparently has optical image stabilization built into the sensor. We'll have to check on that. And I can kind of manually origami him back into his home, but not really.
And honestly, I'm kind of hoping that this robot phone is the first in a long line of robotically articulated devices. Can you imagine if the arm had a claw on the end that could hold a pencil and handwrite a letter?
Or if there were two arms, one on either end, like that creepy toy from Sid's Bedroom, then the phone could walk around by itself. The future is exciting. I, for one, welcome our robot friends, as long as they are small enough to still squish when the uprising occurs.
Speaking of ways to defeat robots, heat is probably not one of them since the 6800 NIT 461 pixel per inch robot phone lasted just 26 seconds, with no visible damage on the OLED display.
One extremely valid way of defeating an articulating robot, though, is with sand, especially a robot designed not to damage humans. The armor has to downsize the actuators by 70% so the arm could fit inside of a smartphone body.
The motors are still plenty strong to lift what they are lifting, but they've been intentionally throttled from a software perspective to not pinch fingers or damage pockets, which means if any small grain of sand or dust gets anywhere near the rotating joints,
even one as fine-tuned as this, a single grain can destroy the whole arm. Now that the cavity is a litter box The arm struggled to raise up and out of the enclosure A few jiggles is all it can muster
I mean, yeah, I did use more than one grain of sand to be sure. After blasting it with some air and cleaning out the majority of the rocks, it will start to lift out of its garage again. But even with subsequent blasts of clean air,
the arm will never fully retract back into its home, probably because some single tiny rock is somewhere in there overpowering the safety sensors. So that IP54 dust resistance rating definitely does not mean the arm is dustproof,
and you should probably never take your honor robot phone to the beach. Segwaying smoothly into the Bintash, though, the rest of the phone is super structurally solid, even with those antenna lines next to the power buttons.
The internals of this device are solid, probably due to the additional structure surrounding the robot arm enclosure, the Honor Robot Phone survives my durability test, even if the robot arm did not.
However, no review is complete without seeing how it all comes together from the inside. Surprisingly, this Honor Robot Phone is built very, very similarly to the iPhone 17 Pro. At first glance, anyway.
Pulling off the rear plastic panel, we can get our first look at the 50-watt wireless charging coil, as well as we find a few screws hidden up near the robot arm mechanism. This teardown will be slightly more chaotic than most
since nobody has ever put a robot arm inside of a smartphone. I'm just not sure what to expect. Before we can do too much, though, it does look like the front screen will need to come off regardless. And like other smartphones, with a bit of heat and a super-thin pry tool,
the display can be separated from the rest of the robot body. And already things are fascinating. Instead of having the vapor chamber attached to the frame of the phone, Honor has glued it to the back side of the screen and is using thermal paste and a graphite sheet
to pull heat from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to push it out through the OLED panel. We also have an underscreen fingerprint reader. Kind of cool. I'll lift up the graphite sheet over top of the motherboard and battery compartment
and start unscrewing some of the Philips head screws. The first thing that catches my eye, though, are the super long wired plugs coming out of the robot arm. Instead of ribbons like we saw in some of the old pop-up camera phones,
This guy is using individual braided wires for both the motorized actuator controls and the camera sensor data transmission. Probably because the regular ribbons would have eventually failed those twisting motions,
but a corded bundle would last a lot longer inside the moving joints. We'll get a closer look in just a second. Flipping back around to the back, it looks like the battery has to be unplugged from behind. I'll pull out the lower protective plastics.
These come with the super thin haptic vibrator motor. Then I'll unscrew a long bracket over the ribbon-style plug, which I can then pop off, just like little Legos. Using my pry tool and a bit of help from some isopropyl alcohol to dissolve the adhesive under the battery,
we can pry it out from the phone's internal cavity. This guy is 7,015 milliamp hours and charges at a whopping 120 watts, which is pretty insane.
It's nice that the battery is pretty easy to remove. Technically, the screen doesn't even need to come off for the battery replacement. Flipping back around to the screen side I will move a few more screws down near the bottom so we can get a closer look at the USB port and its red rubber ring The loudspeaker sits over on the lower right side of the phone and does look watertight with the waterproofing mesh over the cone but it does not have any balls inside
But who needs balls when you have a robot arm? To get to that robot arm, things do get a little more complicated. First I'll pull away the motherboard, this double stacked L-shaped circuit board with a 50 megapixel front camera still attached.
Then I'll pull out the earpiece speaker, basically a smaller version of the speaker at the bottom of the phone, still no balls, and our 200 megapixel periscope telephoto camera which has internal optical image stabilization.
Finally, we get to the robot arm. It looks like all of the mechanical hardware is stacked directly into the arm itself. You can see as we pull away the plastic windows on the sides of each of the arms that we have
our braided wires running up through each segment. The wire groupings are color-coded to which actuators they power, blue and yellow in the lower segments and just silver running up to the top where the sensor itself is located.
The green bundle of wires goes into the high torch stepper motor, which we can see after we remove the glass on the canner plateau. There are four more screws hidden under this glass. Honor did not make the arm easy to remove.
With the whole plateau lifted off, we have access to two more screws near the flippy stepper motor, which then allows us to pull the corded wire cable through the frame and remove the arm from the body.
And there she is in all of her glory. To see the super tiny actuators embedded inside of the titanium alloy segments, we can pop open each of the individual links. Honor says they have milled these components to within a .005mm tolerance, and it looks
pretty crazy in here. The stepper motor in the bottom is similar to what we used to see in the pop-up cameras, but the three 2.5 gram rotating actuators are more flatter donut-shaped contraptions.
I imagine our little grain of sand was stuck in one of these at some point, although I never did find it. Hats off to Honor, though. This thing is incredible. I'll pop off the glass on the main 200 megapixel camera real quick,
just to see if it does have OIS. If I pry off the backside, very interestingly, they have milled out a small portion of the back housing to act as a heat sink for the camera sensor. even using thermal paste to help move heat from the sensor into the metal arm.
That's probably why it was getting a little toasty earlier. And once we lift out the camera unit from its enclosure, we can see it's basically just a normal camera that we commonly see inside of other smartphones. It looks like that at one point in its life it might have been able to shift around with OIS before I pinched the frame.
Even away though, never in the history of smartphone cameras has there ever been such a stabilized image as what comes out of this sensor right here. Robots are pretty fascinating. Let me know down in the comments how you feel about robots inhabiting the space inside of our smartphones.
And, of course, if you're nervous about the robots and data centers using up all the clean water, might I suggest putting some of my jerry cans on a shelf for yourself? Ultra-pure drinking water with a five-year shelf life and free shipping.
Perfect for emergency storage, bug-out bags, and, of course, daily drinking. It's $18 for a 12-pack, which is about three days' worth of emergency storage for one person. The link is down in the description, or you can find us on Amazon by just searching JerryCans.
Staying protective from dehydration is always a good thing. Thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.