Xinhua News Agency reporters Guo Shuang, Chen Yuxuan, Meng Dingbo

At the 2026 Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona, Spain, the robot phone launched by Chinese technology company Honor has attracted high attention from the industry. In an interview with Xinhua News Agency, several industry insiders expressed that this new product has left a deep impression on people and are amazed by the development speed of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in China and its impact on the global terminal ecosystem.

As the latest "entry point" for deeply embedding AI into users' daily lives, this original technology product sends a strong signal to the outside world - AI technology is accelerating from "cloud dialogue" to "end-to-end execution", and Chinese AI agents are entering the global vision in a more life-like form.

Terminal Breakthrough: Unlock a New Entrance to 'Embodied Interaction'

It dances even better than you, "a female audience member said to her male partner while watching the robot phone dance in front of the Honor booth.

Unlike traditional smart terminals, this product completely breaks the rigid design of "boring blocks" in previous smartphones, deeply integrating the two core functions of embodied intelligent interaction and flagship imaging. Li Jian, CEO of Honor, said that as a "new species" of smartphones, it is equipped with a three-axis gimbal camera. Behind it is Honor's concept of "enhancing human intelligence", which means giving intelligence intelligence (IQ) and a sense of life (EQ), thereby enhancing human ability to adapt, evolve, and enjoy the present in a changing world.

Regardless of whether this product form ultimately becomes mainstream, its related narrative shows the fierce competition of the current technology industry on a new track: rapidly advancing AI from a simple chat tool that can speak and write to a task execution carrier that can perceive, collaborate, and act.

Whoever can seize the super entrance of AI intelligent agents will have an advantage in the market competition for decades to come. 2026 is expected to be the "first year" of AI agents, and a number of innovative products are reshaping the development logic of the Internet in the past 30 years. "Analysis by Zhang Lin, Director of Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Bureau.

Market Butterfly Transformation: Accelerating the Transition to "Essential Applications"

As AI technology crosses the application threshold, the demand for terminal products in the global market is undergoing a substantial transformation.

On March 3rd, Shenzhen Huaqiangbei released the global sales heat map of AI hardware products from January to February 2026. The data releases three core signals: firstly, unmanned aerial vehicles continue to be in high heat areas, and the demand in domestic and foreign markets remains strong; Secondly, AI learning devices have seen a surge in popularity during the back to school season, leading to a significant increase in procurement demand; Thirdly, the proportion of overseas orders for smart wearable products such as AI watches and AI glasses is steadily expanding. These three signals collectively confirm a trend: AI hardware is bidding farewell to the label of "trying new things" and increasingly becoming a "must-have product" in people's lives.

From a more macro perspective of the industrial chain, hardware has become a key breakthrough for the landing of AI intelligent agents in China. Previously, there have been explorations in the Chinese domestic market to embed AI big models into the underlying mobile operating system and attempt to automatically execute tasks across applications, demonstrating the enormous potential of intelligent agents on the end side.

Francisco Jeronimo, Vice President of Data and Analytics at International Data Corporation (IDC), told reporters that bringing AI to terminal devices such as robotic phones is also a way to use AI for innovation and provide users with different experiences.

In line with hardware innovation, the competition for entry to intelligent agents on the software side is equally intense. During the Spring Festival this year, many Internet head platforms in China started the battle for entrance in the form of red envelopes, subsidies, etc., which not only increased the number of user interactions significantly, but also increased the utilization rate of functions at a geometric level. Behind the bustling market surface lies a deep business logic: when intelligent agents have the ability to "do things for people", this super entrance will not only redistribute global traffic, but also reshape the interests of multiple fields such as payment, content, tools, and services.

Industrial advancement: 'Edge intelligence' reshapes the development ecosystem

The common pain point when the public interacts with AI models in the past was that AI can provide suggestions, but cannot do things. AI can chat, compose poetry, and draw, but once users request specific cross-system and repetitive tasks such as "help me complete the reimbursement process," text generation alone is often powerless. But now, the AI industry is facing a crucial generational transition, transitioning from the era of text-based chat to the era of task execution-based service," Zhang Lin said.

In this round of technological evolution, the decentralization of AI capabilities to the nodes closest to data, such as smartphones, cars, and machine devices, is seen by the government and industry as a key breakthrough.

However, transforming AI that can provide suggestions into intelligent agents that can accomplish tasks is not simply about expanding computing power. It depends on restructuring the underlying computing architecture and rules and permissions. To support the large-scale industrialization landing, China's innovation highland represented by Shenzhen has incorporated edge intelligent agents that combine software and hardware into its urban development strategy. The recently established Shenzhen Leading Edge Intelligent Open Research Institute is collaborating with chip, algorithm, and robotics companies to tackle 12 core technology directions. This move is of great significance for building a safe and efficient new intelligent ecosystem.

Looking towards the future, the globalization process of China's AI industry still needs to cross high-standard ecological thresholds. As industry experts have pointed out, regardless of the form in which AI terminals iterate, the key is to adhere to the underlying logic of "chip, algorithm, and intelligent agent" and maintain open compatibility with the international mainstream ecosystem. Only in this way can we truly create an AI industry cluster with global influence in the global technological competition landscape.