14 DAY TRIAL // The Japanese mobile ecosystem is home to some wacky devices and the next one we’re going to talk about is certainly pretty bizarre, if you’re not accustomed to Asian culture.
Introducing the robot-smartphone RoboHon - a tiny, artificially intelligent robotic man made of metal that you can pick up and actually talk to. RoboHon actually boasts an entire list of skills and properties, from a projector to articulated animated arms and legs. It can also talk in sentences.
The product is manufactured by Sharp and you shouldn’t expect it to be light and small like most smartphones launching on the market these days. Actually, RoboHon is pretty heavy at 390 g / 0.85 lbs and pretty big at 19.5 cm / 7.67 inches compared to handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S6.
Even so, you can fit RoboHon into your frontal pocket and from there it will smile its cute, robot smile to everyone you encounter. The device takes advantage of Wi-Fi and LTE and has a tiny 2-inch display on the back with 320 x 240 pixel resolution. Furthermore, it is powered by a MSM 8926 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, and we should note that there are cameras for facial recognition and voice recognition built-in, too.
Only in Asia: Talking on the "robot"
Apart from letting you place phone calls, RoboHon is also a pretty good assistant, being capable of walking, sitting down, raising itself up, dancing and raising its arms when it has something to say, just like in class.
So putting aside its smartphone capabilities, it can also act as a talkative alarm clock, memo taker, and text message reader.
Looking at the images accompanying the RoboHon product page, it’s pretty hard to imagine someone would actually go out on the street, take the robot out and start talking on it. Unless they live in Japan, where everything seems to be at some level of acceptableness. However, we can’t argue that RoboHon is darn cute, so we wouldn’t mind having it walk around our house, waving its little arms.
The phone/robot is expected to make a debut on the Japanese market in the first months of 2016, but no pricing specifications have been announced at this point.
