RoboHon robot smartphone from Sharp

It comes with a 2-inch (320 x 240) screen on the back and a camera and projector built into its face. Well, the dream has been materialised by Japanese company Sharp.

But the designers want it to be more than just your pocket-sized secretary; they really want it to be your friend, with the tagline “a phone that moves the heart”.

From the nation that brought you basically every insane robot you’ve ever seen, Sharp on Tuesday flaunted a model robot that serves as a cell phone-or is that a cell phone as a robot?

Most interestingly of all, when asked if a sunset is lovely, the robot can reply in agreement, although it is not clear whether it is actually able to analyse the scene before it and make a real judgment.

The latest phone from Sharp might remind you more of C-3PO from Star Wars than the iPhone.

It can sit, get up, dance, walk and even raise its arms when it has something to tell you. The phone can read messages to the user aloud, understand natural language commands, and respond to messages with a voice-to-text feature. Although the little robot only has a two-inch QVGA screen that can’t support graphic-heavy activities such as Web browsing, it is able to display information thanks to a built-in projector.

The robot, called RoboHon (a words’ blend robot and telephone), will go at a bargain in Japan in the first 50% of 2016. He has voice recognition, dual front cameras and 4G/WiFi to give him all the data access our phones are used to.