With smartphone sales declining each day, companies have to change their strategies like lowering current prices or innovate some aspects of the mobile devices in order to stay relevant. Nextbit is a company founded by people who have some experience with the Android operating system and building some very popular phones that run on the operating system. They started a Kickstarter campaign for a phone named Robin, claiming that it is a “smarter smartphone”. Their approach is to integrate cloud-based storage right into the OS, so that not only the user’s files will be kept there, but also unused apps to be used as and when needed. This kind of futuristic vision could bring additional benefits like having those files accessible from more devices or if the phone ever gets damaged, users can easily recover them without needing to access the original device’s internal storage.
The phone itself has a very angular design with some vibrant color combinations and it features LED indicators to make sure everything is synced in the cloud and another one positioned at the bottom lets users know about notifications. The specs are not to bad either with Robin boasting a 5.2-inch 1080p display, 3GB RAM, Snapdragon 808 hexa-core processor and 32GB storage. Well, the latest is that Nextbit is about to achieve their $1M stretch goal and they have shared some news as well. The phone is made to be compatible in a variety of markets, but now they managed to make it work with Australian networks, so the phone will be shipping in that country. Also, they noticed that a bunch of users were requesting compatibility with the networks of Verizon and Sprint in the US, so the company is considering building a different version of the phone which will support those networks.
In terms of the software, some apps like the Gallery have been optimized for cloud storage, as it shows previews of the photos and retrieves a full resolution version if the picture is needed for zooming into details. While the camera app is designed to highlight the shutter key and the viewfinder, with a pill shaped menu that collapses when not needed.