Sharp Unveils Cute Robot Phone At A Not-So-Cute $1,800 Price

An anonymous reader writes: Japanese manufacturer Sharp officially launched a small robot named RoboHon that doubles as an Android smartphone. The foot-tall robot phone features a two-inch, QVGA display on its back, and a 720p projector embedded in its head. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor powers the robot with Android 5.0 Lollipop running on the software side of things. It can be controlled by voice commands, allowing it to walk and dance -- features like taxi hailing and recipe assistance are apparently in the works. But here's the catch -- RoboHon costs $1,800 or 198,000 yen. If you want to have access to the 3 different voice recognition technologies found in the RoboHon, you'll have to pay an additional "small monthly fee."

Re:Wow

[ShanghaiBill]

$1800 is a reasonable price for a cutting edge product like this.
Back in 1983, I paid $5000 for a 4 MHz PC, and I was happy to have it.

As an early adopter of the Sharp Zaurus...

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can say is if you buy this for the USDM, don't expect Sharp Software support after the first release. They basically abandoned the US Zaurus' immediately after launch and it ended up falling to a seperate open source community to provide images for them (I believe 1-2 years later, long after they were no longer on the market.)

Furthermore the ones that were adequate for non-PDA use (Original looked like a palmpilot with a slide out keyboard... missing the | symbol meaning it couldn't be used at the con

Re:

[LifesABeach]

I can't help but wonder how one of these would be designed for a 6 foot tall version. Might be a little creepy.

small gifts

[slick7]

HAIL! Our robotic Overlords.

Meh

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

I still prefer Mirai Suenaga. [dannychoo.com]

The name

[Michael Woodhams]

TFA doesn't say what the name means, so after a few minutes on this internet thingy I find:
The robot is named RoboHon, which amalgamates the Japanese words for "robot" and "phone" together. [yahoo.com]

and an online dictionary [freedict.com] gives "terehon", "terefon", "denwa" as translations of "telephone".

So it is named "robophone", slightly mangled by transliteration.

Re:

[DavidMZ]

Yes, the Japanese language loves such portmanteaux [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Michael Woodhams]

My problem was that my very slight knowledge of Japanese provided me with two translations for 'hon' - 'book' or 'origin'. Neither seemed to fit very well, so I didn't know if one was right (and there was some connection I was missing) or (as it turned out) there was some other source of 'hon'.

Re:

[DavidMZ]

That's perfectly understandable, there are many homonyms in Japanese which is very confusing for learners. For native or advanced speakers, the meaning is most of the time clear from the context, but there are times where Japanese people will actually say which word they use by saying "as in this word (that uses the same kanji)" or actually drawing the kanji in the air.

I like sharp.

[serviscope_minor]

I like Sharp. In my mind they have always made good quality, slightly off-the-wall products. There is real innovation going on at that company I think.

I think I still have a Zaurus tucked away in a desk draw somewhere. Great product and I used it for quite a while. Sadly only had 64M of RAM which limited its lifetime a bit.

Re:

[PPH]

Bad experiences with slavery.

Re:

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

This is why we need a "Dark Humor" moderation choice.

Cute, but ...

[PPH]

.... never feed it after midnight [gtsstatic.com].