Your phone can now turn photos into five-second films (kind of)
Matt V
May 13, 2025
Chinese phone maker Honor is launching a new Google-powered image-to-video feature - ahead of Google’s own Gemini users.
It’s built into the new Honor 400 and 400 Pro phones, which go on sale on the 22nd of May.
Powered by Google’s Veo 2 model, the tool takes a still image and turns it into a five-second video, either portrait or landscape, in about a minute.
You can’t add a text prompt, so the results depend entirely on what’s in the image.
It does well with pets and portraits, but things go off-script with more complex scenes, like vintage cars spinning unrealistically, tomatoes being poked by ghost hands, or a surreal football match with 27 players and two referees.
Here’s what you should know:
Honor gets early access to Google’s video AI for its new phones
Results range from realistic to bizarre, depending on your image
It’s free to use at launch but will later require a paid Google plan
Tomato hands and football nightmares
The tool is free for the first two months for anyone who buys a Honor 400, with a cap of 10 video generations a day.
After that, it’ll need a Google subscription, but details are still unclear.
Google’s own Veo 2 tech is already available through its paid Gemini Advanced plan, but only for text-to-video generation.
Image-to-video is listed in Google Cloud at 50 cents per second, but only accessible to select users.
Google: builds it.
Honor: drops it.
Gemini users: crying in text prompts.