Nextbit Robin

» see nextbit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i saw the nextbit robin was on the front page of kickstarter in september 2015, and even from ankara it was clearly the most engineer-thought-out android hardware pitch of the year. the founders were tom moss and mike chan, both ex-google android team, plus scott croyle from HTC (he had led design on the HTC one). the whole hardware premise was that most of what filled a phone's local storage was stuff you did not need on the device right now. so the robin would offload cold apps and photos to the cloud automatically and pull them back on demand.

the kickstarter hit its $500,000 goal in twelve hours and closed at $1.36 million. first backer units shipped on 16 february 2016. $399 unlocked, snapdragon 808, 3 gb of ram, 32 gb of local storage paired with 100 gb of nextbit cloud storage baked into the OS. polycarbonate mint-and-blue color scheme with two front-facing speakers stacked vertically. the industrial design won a red dot award later that year.

the robin's peak years overlap with the years i was still occasionally rooting phones for fun, but this one never landed at retail in turkey. it was a US-english kickstarter product that never got a proper distribution deal outside north america and the UK. i was 32 in ankara in february 2016, running a samsung on official android with google photos already backing everything up, which meant the robin's core value proposition was mostly solved by an existing free service on my current phone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the reviews in march and april 2016 were split. the hardware got credit for the industrial design and the front-facing speakers. the software got credit for a clean stock-android feel with a handful of nextbit customizations layered in. the cloud offload itself worked, technically. you would notice a slight redownload lag when an app you had not opened in a couple of weeks was pulled back from the cloud. that was the whole point of the phone and also the moment where users had to decide whether the tradeoff was worth it.

for most people it was not. google photos already had unlimited free high-quality photo backup at the time. individual apps were already cheap to reinstall from the play store. verizon and t-mobile customers could not activate the robin because it was gsm-only (sold on at&t and t-mobile bands), which cut the addressable market roughly in half in the US alone. sales after the kickstarter run never grew past a niche.

~ the cracks ~

by mid-2016 nextbit was clearly running out of runway. an update in july fixed a batch of camera bugs. the retail price got cut to $299 in a fall promotion. a marlin variant was teased and never shipped. tom moss did a couple of press interviews framing the company as "at a crossroads." the crossroads turned out to be a buyer.

on 30 january 2017 razer announced the acquisition. all thirty nextbit staff moved to razer. sales of the robin halted almost immediately. the software update commitment was extended through february 2018, which was more generous than most acqui-hire shutdowns of the era but still gave existing owners a hard end date to work with.

~ what got buried with it ~

the cloud storage feature went offline on 1 march 2018, with data accessible for one more month before final wipe on 1 april. the robin still worked as a phone after that, just without the distinguishing feature that made it a robin. the industrial-design DNA showed up ten months after the acquisition in razer's own first handset. the razer phone landed in november 2017 with a similar polycarbonate slab body, the same front-facing dual-speaker placement, and razer's own gaming-oriented software. so the nextbit industrial designers got to ship one more phone. the cloud-first android concept did not.

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