Unitree on Sept. 21, 2026, said it is selling the Dex5-S, a five-finger dexterous hand with 22 degrees of freedom at 1:1 real-hand size, from $6.5K before tax and shipping, with all 22 joints backdrivable and each joint carrying limit impact torque protection. The claim matters because high-DoF hands remain a bottleneck for humanoid teleoperation and learning pipelines, and a company list price near that level would put Unitree under many research-grade quotes if the base kit can actually ship and integrate.
Dex5-S is a wrist-mount manipulation peripheral, not a new humanoid chassis and not the UnifoLM-X2 combat demo already covered on the archive. Versus Unitree's earlier Dex5-1, which AlphaSignal restates as 20 DoF split into 16 active and four passive axes, the S model claims 22 fully driven axes and a new little-finger roll. Phoenix Tech and Sina/IT之家 put mass near 620 g, size 102×187×26 mm, peak load 2 kg and continuous 1 kg, 15-65 V supply, and control up to 1000 Hz on T1s Ethernet/USB. CN press says the Standard SKU keeps position, torque, and IMU-class feedback, while tactile sensing is Pro-only; do not read Dex5-1's optional ~94-point lore onto the base S.
Unitree's primary surface is its X launch post, which attaches an about 43-second demo clip and states the from-$6.5K list with tax and shipping excluded. Chinese coverage the same day and next morning quotes an official start of ¥39,900 and the DoF split of thumb 5 / index/middle/ring 4 each / little finger 5. No dedicated unitree.com/Dex5-S shop page was live at dig time; the Dex5-1 product page remained the public catalog surface.
Independent writeups restated the company pricing with harder edges. AlphaSignal placed Dex5-S beside SharpaWave and Shadow-class commercial hands, flagged missing force and speed curves, SDK/ROS docs, and durability data, and said the $6,500 figure is best treated as an entry price rather than a fully loaded research kit. Humanoid.guide's product card lists 6500 USD, 22 DoF, 0.62 kg, and 2 kg strength as aggregator fields, not a lab re-test. RobotToday noted the announcement still lacked some performance metrics even as Phoenix and Sina published the load and interface sheet preferred here.
What remains open is whether independent labs will publish force-control, latency, and cycle numbers, whether base Dex5-S ships with any tactile array, and how mounting, power, and software land on G1, H1, and H2. Company list price and CN press specs should be weighed against the thin EN sheet until datasheets and third-party benches appear.