Robotics is a nightmarish world filled by robot snakes, terminators and ... phones that can run away from you. This is no joke. A phone as a bipedal robot is Sharp's latest invention and soon to be product. Could this be the personal assistant we have all been waiting for?

It is difficult to know how to react to this one. If you thought Google Glass was a device designed to make people look silly, then how about holding a tiny robot to your ear!

However this might not be as silly as it looks. 

The robot - RoBoHoN - is a perfectly respectable mobile phone with full LTE/3G/WiFi, a Snapdragon 400 quad ARM processor, a camera and a 2-inch touch screen - although voice interaction seems to be the preferred UI. 

The killer feature might be its ability to walk and project an image onto a surface. What could be better than a robot phone that asks to take your picture, crouches down to get the best shot and then leans forward to project the result onto table top.

Although the video below is something of a fantasy, the robot does have face recognition so it could actually move to a position that best frames your face. It also has an emotion engine and, like all social robots, this is where things are unlikely to be as advanced as the video suggests:

The robot is 19.5 cm tall and weight 390 grams so it really is portable but even if a bit too big to be treated as "just a mobile phone".

It is obvious that it can do all of those things that a phone can. What isn't clear is how usable its extra features due to it being a social robot will be in real life. 

It is supposed to be going on sale in Japan early next year.

No word on whether or not it will be available in the rest of the world and no word on what OS it runs or any API that might allow you to create your own apps.

So does this android run Android or something else?

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