• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, October 14, 2015

At first glance, I thought the recent introduction of a tiny robot that’s also a smartphone was a joke.

The RoboHon (that’s robot and phone kind of mashed together) introduced by Sharp is a robot with a built-in camera, projector, LCD screen, microphone, speakers and is also an Android phone.

It also includes facial and voice recognition technology and is coming out in Japan next year.

It notifies the owner when a message is received and communicates verbally.

RoboHon shows directions by projecting them on a map to any surface from the projector built into its head. It also can project a slide show to a screen or wall (and presumably an ad or commercial as well).

It can make selfies a thing of the past, shooting pictures at will, show a baby how to walk and can host a video chat.

You can tell RoboHon to add something onto a shopping list and it auto-prompts. Oh, it also can dance.

The concept video shows the robot phone ringing with a consumer answering it by holding the robot up to his ear (yes, it looks odd as well).

Whether the robot-phone will catch on is anybody’s guess, but it does show how multiple technologies can be integrated into one device, at eight inches tall, a pretty small one at that.

And since it has a screen built in and can project any image onto any surface, using it for marketing messaging is only a matter of time.