Sharp RoBoHoN SR-03M-Y

RoBoHoN is Sharp's answer to a question nobody else kept asking after 2016: what if the phone walked. The SR-03M-Y is the LTE/3G member of the three-model refresh Sharp announced on 18 February 2019 and put on sale on 27 February, alongside the Wi-Fi-only SR-04M-Y and the seated, legless RoBoHoN lite SR-05M-Y. The robot stands 19.8 cm tall and weighs about 395 g. Inside is an ordinary mid-range Android phone of its day — Android 8.1 on a Snapdragon 430 octa-core, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, a 2.6-inch QVGA screen on its back, an 8-megapixel camera in its forehead and a 1,700 mAh battery that Sharp rates at more than a day given roughly 130 minutes of daily use, recharging in about 130 minutes. What is not ordinary is everything around it: the LTE and 3G radios with VoLTE wideband calling mean this is a phone you can legally register a number to, and it takes the call standing up, walking, dancing or singing. Movement is the whole point of the price difference in the range. SR-03M-Y and the Wi-Fi SR-04M-Y walk on two legs and can get up after falling; the lite model does neither and stays seated, which is why it costs roughly a third less. All three recognise speech and faces, sing and dance. Sensing is modest and phone-derived: a nine-axis motion unit (three-axis accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope) plus an ambient light sensor, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2 and GPS. Sharp launched the trio at 180,000, 120,000 and 79,000 yen before tax; the current list prices on the RoBoHoN site are 239,800, 145,200 and 95,590 yen, and using the robot also requires a Cocoro Plan subscription starting at 980 yen a month. Seven years after this generation appeared it is still on sale, which makes RoBoHoN one of the longest-running consumer companion robots on the Japanese market.

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