Nextbit gives us an early look at its cloud-first Robin smartphone

Now that Nextbit has entered the smartphone market, the company is having a celebration party in its home city of San Francisco today. Its first smartphone isn’t the only thing to be celebrating either, as the new device also managed to reach its Kickstarter goal of $500,000 in less than 12 hours! As impressive as that is, the smartphone itself may be even more so. Known as Robin, Nextbit claims that its new smartphone is the first “cloud-first, design forward” device to hit the market, and Engadget got an early look at it to see how true that claim is. 

Nextbit wanted to celebrate the launch of its debut smartphone today at a party in San Francisco, but it turned out to be a celebration of success as well. In just under 12 hours, the startup reached its $500,000 Kickstarter goal to fund the Robin, an Android phone that isn’t only “cloud first,” but also surprisingly design forward as well. We had a chance to get an early look at what the final product might actually look like (though bear in mind these are all still prototypes) and asked Scott Croyle, Nextbit’s Chief Product and Design Officer — who’s also a former design lead for HTC — a few questions about the phone as well. First, let’s recap: The big idea behind the Robin is that when you get it, not only do you get 32GB of internal storage, but you also get 100GB of cloud storage — completely free. When you’ve maxed out the capacity of your phone, Robin is intelligent enough to slowly offload lesser used apps and/or media to the cloud. “It’s a unique hybrid approach,” said Croyle.