Sharp has taken the covers off an incredibly awesome walking, talking and dancing robot smartphone called Robohon. Described as the ‘heart moving phone,’ it’s going to get even mature adults crying their eyes out, wishing they could have it. The 7.6-inch tall gadget is essentially the unwieldiest handset you could carry around with you.
It can sit, stand, dance, raise its hands to notify users of an incoming call, message, mail or notification and respond to natural dialogue like Apple’s Siri or Google Now. The Robohon was designed by Sharp and Tomotaka Takahashi, roboticist and founder of Kyoto University’s ROBO-GARAGE.
The name is a derivative of ‘robot’ and ‘phone.’ The Robohon has a 2-inch 320 x 240p resolution screen on its back. Its face plays host to the camera and projector, as shown in the video below. There’s also a speaker function for when you want to answer a call handsfree or need messages to be read out loud.
If you’ve ever wanted to show off a dancing speaker at your party, this is it. Apart from being able to break into some awkward party moves, Sharp’s mini robot can be used as an alarm or be made to take memos. It incorporates face and voice recognition technology, but its dialogue comprehension may not be perfect.
To answer two questions which may have popped into your head, it is not a practical-sized phone nor will it prevent you looking like a weirdo when you take calls on it. Sharp slipped the covers off the prototype version of the Robohon at the CEATEC (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) trade show in Japan.
The robot smartphone has a quad core MSM 8926 chipset clocked at 1.2GHz inside it. Sharp has stuffed it with LTE, 3G and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n compatibility. It’s quite heavy for a handset at 390 grams, though we bet many will be happy to ignore that. But it’s strictly not the kind of gadget you’d want to take to the office.
Sharp has announced that the Robohon will be available in the market in the first half of 2016. Hold your horses because we’re not done yet; only fans in Japan will be able to lay hands on it. Let the cries of longing begin anew.