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What Made This Phone So Weird?
Smartphones today are, frankly, pretty boring—but it wasn’t always this way! Back in 2016, a company called Nextbit had the crazy idea to launch an Android phone that relied almost entirely on cloud storage. It was weird.
The phone was the Nextbit Robin, and it arrived at a time when the smartphone landscape had a lot more variety. Nowadays, it’s all about Apple, Samsung, Google, and a few other names. Nearly a decade ago, that list was much longer, which gave upstarts like Nextbit a chance to grab headlines.
A Short, Strange History
The Nextbit Robin’s story began with a promising pedigree. The company was founded by people who had previously worked at Google and HTC. That included Scott Croyle, who had been HTC’s VP of Design and UX. Back then, HTC was a hot brand praised for its attention to design, so people had high hopes for the Robin.
The story goes that the Nextbit team wasn’t satisfied with the status quo of ever-increasing internal storage, so they set out to build something different. Their concept was a “cloud-first smartphone,” and people seemed to like the idea. In 2015, it successfully blew past its funding goal of $500,000 on Kickstarter in 12 hours.
Credit: Mobile Phone Museum
The phone was officially released in early 2016 as an unlocked Android device. While it came with specs comparable to mid-range phones of the time, like the Snapdragon 808 processor and 3GB of RAM, it had a much more interesting design. It also had 32GB of storage—more on that later.
Sadly, Nextbit and the Robin didn’t last long. In early 2017, not even a year after the Robin launched, the company was acquired by Razer. Soon after, the Robin was discontinued. The cloud storage service, which was essentially the entire point of the phone, was shut down entirely in 2018, leaving owners with a beautifully designed, dead Android phone.
What Made This Phone So Weird?
If you only look at the spec sheet, you might not notice anything unusual about the Nextbit Robin, but there were several things that made it stand out from the crowd.
First, there was the design. At a time when curved edges and slick metal were all the rage, the Robin was a sharp, rectangular slab of colorful matte plastic. Its distinctive cloud white and mint color scheme immediately set it apart. Even looking at it today, the Robin seems more like a prototype than a phone you could actually buy.
But the real oddity and the main selling point of the Robin was the “Smart Storage” feature. It had 32GB of physical internal storage—pretty standard in 2016—but it also came with 100GB of cloud storage that was integrated into the OS. Nextbit was so confident in this feature that the device didn’t have a microSD card slot, which was very uncommon.
The idea was that you didn’t have to manage the cloud storage separately, like you would with a third-party app. Instead, the phone automatically monitored your usage and, when storage was low, it would archive your least-used apps and photos to the cloud. When an app was offloaded, its icon would remain on your home screen, but appear grayed out. Tapping the icon would pull the full app and its data back down from the cloud.
For photos, the phone kept a low-resolution copy locally, only downloading the full-resolution version when you zoomed in. It was a neat feature that promised to eliminate that annoying “storage almost full” message, but there were some obvious shortcomings and problems.
First of all, you had no direct control over all of this cloud stuff. The phone decided what to archive, not you. Then there was the fact that you had to put a lot of faith into a small startup’s cloud servers. It would’ve been one thing if this idea was from Samsung, Apple, or even an established cloud storage name like Dropbox, but no one knew if Nextbit could be trusted to keep the ship afloat.
There was brief talk of a Robin 2, but it never got past the prototype phase, and Razer ultimately moved on to the Razer Phone. It had a very similar physical design to the Robin, but Razer didn’t continue with any of Nextbit’s cloud storage ideas.
That’s the story of the Nextbit Robin. Nowadays, smartphones have similar ideas, but it’s less of a gimmick. iPhones can offload content—including unused apps—automatically to iCloud as needed. Android phones can use Google Photos for automatic media offloading, and the Play Store has an option to archive unused apps.
Unfortunately, small companies often fail, only to see their ideas gobbled up by the big brands. Nextbit walked so others could run, and we should thank them for it.
Sources: Wikipedia, Mobile Phone Museum