When we first read about Sharp’s RoBoHon, we seriously don’t know what to make of it. At a glance, it appears to be yet another super cute robot toy that the Land of the Rising Sun has to offer, but in reality, it is more than meets the eye – much, much, more. It is, in fact, a smartphone. What!? Yes. A smartphone. What’s more unbelievable is, it is a real product that’s set to go on sale (in Japan, of course) in 2016. Tipping the scale at a grand 390g and standing 19.5cm tall, it is not exactly pocketable. Talked about big-ass smartphone; RoBoHon here gladly takes the cake. However, those “issues” would be non-existence if you knew what it is capable of.
It packs what today’s smartphone has to offer, including WiFi, LTE radio, a touch-enabled, albeit tiny, display, plus not-so-standard smartphone features like facial recognition cameras and voice recognition, and oh, it animates too. It sits and walks, and can express itself through dance and even raise its arms when it needs to tell you something. It will wake you up in the morning with gentle voices, help you to remember things, and handle your text messages by reading them to you, and you can reply by telling it to do so. So yeah. It can do pretty much what Siri does, but in a cuter and more expressive way.
But those are not all. RoBoHon is also a life logger, capturing images as you go about your daily routine – all you need is to hang this 390g package over your neck, and because the screen is just 2 inch small, it has a pico projector stuck to its head, so you can choose to project maps and photos for ease of viewing. We are accustom to oddities from Japan, but I have never imagine it would be one that I am tempted to empty my wallet for.
