After using the Honor Robot Phone's "basically peerless" gimbal camera, I can't work out if it's the future or not

Honor's Robot Phone almost has dibs on the "most interesting phone" conversation at the moment, despite Samsung's valiant effort with the new shape of the Galaxy Z Fold 8. We simply haven't ever seen anything quite like a handset with a built-in motorised gimbal arm, after all.

After getting to wave at the phone at MWC in Barcelona earlier this year, I finally got to actually go properly hands-on with it in London this week, and there's a big gulf between those two experiences. Actually using the Robot Phone underlines just how much of a fun tool its gimbal is, although it still left me with questions about its long-term viability.

An engineering marvel

At this point, the Robot Phone has been trailed and unveiled so many times that its design is far from a surprise, but finally getting to go up close with it, to actually check it out from every angle, it really is an impressive bit of engineering.

This is a phone that's traditional in most ways, but completely different in one big, obvious element. The phone itself is slightly thicker than most modern flagships, but there's only one reason for that – the gimbal that collapses into its camera unit.

Amusingly, there are regular cameras here, for ultrawide shots and zooming in, but I don't think most people are coming to the Robot phone to use them.

Far more important is that robotic arm, which requires a couple of steps to use. First, you manually swipe open the protective cover that normally keeps the dust off it. Then, in the phone's camera app, you tap a little gimbal icon to activate it, and watch it pop up ready for shooting.

Once it's open, you have a huge range of control options available to you, including a virtual joystick to manually move the camera and direct it. This is responsive and easy to get to grips with, but it also moves the lens quite slowly.

More impressive is the automatic subject-tracking. Double-tapping on an object, building or person in the viewfinder will lock the camera onto it (if the subject-tracking mode is turned on). This will let you move the phone around pretty freely without it letting your subject out of the shot.

It's pretty brilliant, and I tested it on trains, a passing helicopter, and much more, all from a rooftop vantage point. It's clearly going to be ideal for those who'd otherwise pack an extra action camera into their gear pack, albeit it has a few limitations that those cameras don't (more on that later).

The footage I was able to review was really impressive, too, and did a decent job of selling the whole concept, frankly. That said, selling the phone is an interesting topic – it's only confirmed for sale in China at this point, and I can't help but feel it's really unlikely to make it to the UK in this guise.

Kinks to be ironed out

The sheer fact that Honor has managed to get a gimbal onto its phone makes the Robot Phone basically peerless – no other handset can match this one big feature.

That said, that lack of competition makes it hard to judge how good the gimbal is, and it does have clear limitations. One is that its freedom of movement isn't total. Because the camera's on an arm, it can move a lot more freely to the right than it can to the left.

This is hard to describe, but it means that if you lock a subject directly in front of you, then turn the phone to your right, you can keep going for ages before the gimbal reaches its maximum and you lose your subject. Turn to the left, though, and you'll hit that limit way more quickly.

I can see how that sounds like a tiny issue, but I think it's the sort of thing that you'd have to work around basically any time you shoot some dynamic footage, and it isn't a problem that I'm aware of many full-on gimbal cameras having.

If that gimbal does have limitations, then, it's also fair to say that the software experience I tinkered with doesn't feel quite final. It was fairly common to encounter small bugs or features that didn't want to work the first time around.

That's obviously entirely forgivable on a phone that isn't yet shipping, but in China the Robot Phone is now a real consumer product, and I'd be a little irked by some of the kinks in the system if I'd paid for it.

Then again, just like with the first generation of folding phones some years back, this is also very much an early-adopter type of phone, one that you know is doing something unique. It won't be an enormous surprise when it's a little quirky as a result.

I also have real reservations when it comes to durability – I obviously couldn't do any drop-testing with what remains a rare phone, but I'm extremely curious about how the gimbal would fare if you dropped the phone. It's also likely to be a stress point for mechanical failure, and I'd assume that a normal phone would have a far better chance of surviving for a longer span of years.

In some ways, that sums up how I felt about the Robot Phone after finally getting to actually use it. The novelty factor is huge here – that camera is unlike anything else on a phone right now, and it's really fun and rewarding to explore its abilities and limits.

That said, without any firm hints on a US or UK release, and therefore no pricing to contextualise it, it still feels like a bit of a mirage right now, even after having held it. Will this be a flash in the pan, or is there a genuine mainstream lineage of Robot Phone successors to come?