We first saw Sharp’s robot phone back at CEATEC 2015. It’s a unique product as it’s designed to be a small robot that doubles as a smartphone, Sharp calls it the RoboHon, signifying that this is a combination between a robot and a phone. Sharp said back then that the RoboHon will be released at some point in 2016 and now there’s information about its pricing. It’s not as affordable as you might expect a smartphone to be.
Sharp is going to release the RoboHon in Japan first before it decides to release it in other markets across the globe. It’s going to be released on May 26th and customers will have to pay around $1,800 for this device, that’s as much as one has to pay for three iPhones.
Then again, your iPhone isn’t a robot, and this is. The tiny robot is not only capable of allowing you to make phone calls, it can walk and dance and even has an embedded projector inside its head which can display photos and videos at 720p.
It’s also a bit different from your conventional smartphone because it only has a 2 inch QVGA display. Sharp says that a big display is not required since the idea here is to reduce the need for interacting with the screen.
Three different voice recognition technologies have been baked inside RoboHon, it even has offline voice recognition, to make sure that users are able to survive without a big touchscreen display.
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