You are into Android smartphones but you’re missing innovation from the manufacturing giants? We have maybe found a good alternative to the flagships for you. Robin by Nextbit is a new smartphone with an awesome design and an interesting concept behind it. They go all-in on cloud focus.
About Nextbit
Nextbit was founded in 2012 by Tom Moss and Mike Chan in San Francisco, CA. Those two are Android pioneers from day one and want to use their ideas to bring the Android community an all new device. Their key columns of product design are ‘bold’, ‘powerful’, ‘open’ and ‘cloud first’. That’s the mantra they followed throughout the ideation and development of the new Robin smartphone.
Software
The Robin is planned to be delivered with an OS based on the Android Marshmallow version with a few tweaks here and there to give it a cool look and to optimize it for cloud use. Many manufacturers enforce you to have their own apps running on the system leaving the users unable to uninstall these. Sometimes they even agree on engagements with third parties to have their apps permanently installed in compensation for some major coin.
Robin will come to you without any kind of enforced bloatware and yet you will be able to utilize major mobile solution providers such as Google or Yahoo. As the solution is focused on cloud use, you better bring a solid data plan or stay in wifi throughout your day to ensure you can always access all your files. This is certainly the way to go but in some regions in this world this might not work out 100% as planned.
Nevertheless I agree on the direction of cloud-centric solutions and going away from using local storage. The marketing suggests the cloud storage will grow with the the user but as a start they will provide every phone with 100gb cloud storage. That’s not too shabby.
Hardware
I absolutely love the design and the colour options of the Robin smartphone. That alone is a strong buy-reason for everybody who is a little weary of the mainstream design floating around the last 2-3 years. We were unable to test the device ourselves so we can not really judge the photos of the camera on the phone but we really enjoyed the design of having a stereo front facing speaker setup.
Let’s face it – since the end of the 90s we are experiencing a downtrend on audio quality and the average user is really okay with that. Personally I have a strong desire for a stereo front speaker becoming a mandatory feature for all phones but for now we give Nextbit kudos for actually kicking it.
Of course we also grabbed the hardware specs and hard facts for you. You can find a list of components and specifications further below.
Summary
Nextbit is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for crowdfunding and even though the gig still runs for 22 more days they have already received about $900,000 backing – exceeding the goal of $500,000 which they aimed for in order to turn the vision into an actual product. Based on our experiences with product pricing of completed Kickstarter gigs we estimate the final price of the Robin smartphone to be around 350-400 USD and it seems to be in the same segment as the OnePlus 2. The product seems to be available for shipping earliest on January 2016. We are absolutely intrigued.
“This sleek but unassuming smartphone isn’t an iPhone killer or a Galaxy killer, and it won’t kill any other smartphones on the market. Instead, it’s a problem killer”
– BGR
Specs
- Processor: Snapdragon 808
- Memory: 3GB RAM / 32GB onboard / 100GB online
- Screen: 5.2” IPS LCD 1080p, Gorilla Glass 4
- Rear Camera: 13MP with phase detection autofocus, dual tone flash
- Front camera: 5MP
- Battery: 2680mAh
- Dual front facing stereo speakers
- Fingerprint sensor
- NFC
- Quick charging
- Bluetooth 4.0 LE
- WiFi A/B/G/N/AC
- GSM 850/900/1800/1900
- WCDMA 850/900/1800/1900/2100
- LTE Bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/17/20/28
- Dimensions: 149mm x 72mm x 7mm
- Weight: Approx. 150g
- GPS enabled
Kickstarter: Robin. The smarter smartphone.
Photo credit: Nextbit
