It’s been just six months since Nextbit announced their Robin smartphone to the world with a Kickstarter campaign. That campaign blew through its modest $500,000 ask and ended up with $1.3 million in support. Now, the phone is here – literally. We’re happy to announce that one of the first Nextbin Robin units on the planet is currently gracing Ausdroid’s test bench, and we think you’ll agree it’s a bit of a stunner.
The Robin is the world’s first cloud-first smartphone. The phone ships with 32GB of builtin storage and 100GB of cloud backup space. It intelligently bumps apps and photos off the device to make space when you’re running low, and can recall items from the cloud at their time of use, if needed. Backups are made overnight when the phone is charging and connected to Wifi.
As reported when we met Nextbit at CES, the phones are ready to start shipping out to Kickstarter backers in the coming days – other preorders will be on the way soon, and the company’s online store will be open on February 18.
Since this is one of the first units around, it’s an occasion that calls for an unboxing video!
The Robin has an impressive spec list for a phone coming in at its US$400 price point – there’s a nice big 5.2-inch 1080p display with front-facing speakers, a fingerprint sensor in the side power button and it’s all powered by a hex-core Snapdragon Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 with Adreno 418 GPU with 3GB RAM to help multitasking. There’s a 13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera and a 2,680 mAh battery that the company says will get you through the day.
As you’d expect for a phone coming from a company with employees hailing from Google, Motorola and HTC, our review unit is running a shiny new version of Android – the Robin is one of the first phones to ship with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box.
Unlike some other phone startups selling direct to consumers, Nextbit wants Australians to get in on the party – the phone will ship here, and Nextbit has included support for most Australian 4G and 4G+ bands.
We’ve been pretty excited to get our hands on the Robin since our brief with with the phone at CES. Now that that time is here, we’ve started putting the phone through its paces and will have a review soon!
Are you excited for the Robin? Did you back it at Kickstarter, or preorder after the campaign ended? Tell us in the comments.
“Most Australian…bands”
Can’t we flesh that out a little and make
It clear what the phone is missing?
Not really interested in the Robin. Sure it looks funky, and based on the design and (most of) the specs I wouldn’t mind having one. But I’m only on a cheap plan with not much data, and when buying a phone I’d rather pay once to get more storage, not to keep paying every month for extra data just so I can access my stuff being held in the cloud by a company which may or may not be around in a couple of years time.