Sharp Unveils Cute Robot Phone At A Not-So-Cute $1,800 Price (60abc.com)

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."

Comments

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.

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.

and an online dictionary gives "terehon", "terefon", "denwa" as translations of "telephone".

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

Re:The name

[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.