Nextbit
Robin

The Nextbit Robin was created by an exciting team with experience at HTC and Google – most notably including Scott Croyle who was previously HTC’s Vice President of Design and User Experience and a well-established designer in his own right. This team raised financing from a number of investors and also set up a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the development raising $1.3 million (far exceeding the goal of $500,000). It eventually delivered 1000 phones to the Kickstarter backers. The phone was positioned as a “cloud-first smartphone” with storage capacity kept to a minimum with much of the data residing in the cloud. Through the Kickstarter campaign, the phone was offered at $299 and $349, but eventually went on general sale at $399. The Robin included a 13-megapixel camera, a fingerprint sensor, dual front-facing speakers and the storage on the phone was referred to as 32GB “offline” (internal) and 100GB “online” (the cloud storage element). Commenting at the time, Scott Croyle noted that “Nextbit was formed with the idea to build the next generation of computing – not mobile computing, just computing” by focusing on developing a vision of a device that eventually would be almost wholly dependent on the cloud. However, he acknowledged at the time that the vision could be a decade away. The software on the Robin phone was cleverly optimised to remove apps that you use infrequently to free up space on the device, however they remained as a greyed-out icon on the phone – along with the user data and settings for that service. If you wanted to use the app again, you just tapped on the greyed-out icon and it was re-downloaded. It also had a feature that could automatically manage your photos. If the phone was getting low on memory it was able to work out the images you had not opened recently, downsize the local copy to reduce its footprint and then keep the master image in the cloud. Furthermore, it downsized the image to the optimal resolution for the phone’s display. If you happened to zoom in on a downsized photo, the phone would automatically retrieve the full resolution image from the cloud. Nextbit was eventually acquired by videogame hardware maker Razer and although it was working on a second product, the Robin 2, this never got past the prototype stage and the team shifted its focus to making the Razer Phone.