Nextbit Robin Review- Unlimited Storage
This is the Nextbit Robin and it’s supposed to be the smartphone that never runs out of storage at least that’s what they claim. So as a new $400 smartphone this thing is actually really interesting. Any time you get an entire phone made by a brand new company. There are some decisions that have to be made to put it on the map and the robin is no exception.
Nextbit Robin is this very squared off rectangular phone with tight corners a kind of looks a little uncomfortable at first but it has a sort of soft touch finish and it actually feels really good to hand it has a decent balance of weight. It’s got well-fitted parts and it’s durable enough that it feels like you can hurt so on with this thing. So it’s well built it feels good. You’ve got your power button on the right-hand side which is also a fingerprint reader and your tiny volume buttons on the left-hand side.
I think these might be the worst part of the build the buttons are small with very little travel and then the power button on the right it doesn’t portray it at all. So it can be kind of hard to tell which side is up without looking the fingerprint reader actually really good though the speed and accuracy are on point. Prototype with the side placement like this actually kind of like you can have two fingers registered your left index finger and your right thumb for the way you grip the phone anyway USB type C at the bottom left corner with a quick charging light and on the front door stereo front facing speakers. I love this. They’re loud and clear. So that’s awesome for gaming listening to music and watching videos etc
The great choice there now from here you can pick it up and use it kind of just like a normal 400$ Android smartphone. It’s running the latest version of Android 6.0 and it’s a custom Nextbit skin which will get to in a second but a lot of the elements still feel pretty stocks like the notifications the lock screen the quick settings etc. The specs are pretty good to snapdragon 808chip, 2GB of RAM and a 2680mAH Battery.
I’d say the performance to the specs were up to par pretty smooth throughout. Just an occasional force close or a weird storage problem but the battery life was a little worse I was getting like three and a half hours of screen on time which is less than I expected out of a 5.2inch display that 13 megapixel camera on the back was decent kind of reminded me of the Blackberry prove camera actually. So colors out of it were fine and details fine but dynamic range was a little weak so a lot of stuff got overexposed. But overall solid for the budget just a little slow to actually take the photos in the custom next bit camera app as you can see that shutter lag is real but so how is this the phone that doesn’t run out of storage.
Well, all the magic is buried here in the Nextbit skin. So every Nextbit Robin comes with 32 gigs of onboard storage but then also 100 gigs of free cloud storage now right off the bat. That’s not unlimited. But whatever. That’s a lot more than 32gigs.
And then the robin is supposed to be smart enough and it is to offload the oldest and least frequently use stuff from the internal storage straight to the cloud when it has been accessed in a while. So when you start to fill the void you gigabytes old apps and old photos that haven’t been opened in a while will move to the cloud and make room for more and the idea is for that to happen seamlessly almost without you ever having a notice.
Now this is the Nextbit launcher and as you can see here all these app icons. There is no after or so all of your apps here are spread across all your home screens. Now you may have noticed some of the icons are great out. So these are the apps that are offline or in the cloud and they’re not stored on the device anymore. When you click on them, it takes a minute to download everything in the state you last left it in and then it opens up right where you left off . It takes a good second even on solid WiFi but this archiving and restoring process is the big selling point for the Robin.
Now if there are apps you use all the time they don’t want to get archived. You can swipe down on the icon to pin them pinned apps never go to the cloud. They’re pinned on the device forever. Of course, if you use. All the time you shouldn’t even need to pin them. It shouldn’t accidentally get archived if you use it a lot but yeah that’s it that’s the secret to Robin never running out of storage now for a 400$ phone having potentially 132 gigs of storage is cool. But it’s now also dependent on the Internet and buying into that Nextbit system and I almost wouldn’t buy this phone just for this feature, in fact, I buy this phone just for the fact that at its price. It’s actually a pretty solid Android smartphone and you can ignore all the Nextbit stuff and just use it like a normal phone tossing your launcher of choice you can route it from it. The bootloader is actually unlocked off the box and all support loading Sangean monitors something. And they still honor the warranty.
So this is like a good phone for the price outside of their storage solution. Now if you were buying a mid-range phone specifically focusing on having lots of storage. I look at something with a micro SD card like maybe the one plus X because you can go past 132gigs but if that’s not hugely important and you’re choosing between this and something like Nexus 5X or one plus 2 definitely worth considering this the build quality is up to par the specs and performance are pretty solid and the user experience isn’t too crazy and obviously you can change the way you like it. Now I’ll say this if this were a normal 400 dollars. Vanilla Android smartphone with a micro SD card slot instead of the Nextbit cloud stuff. It might have been a hit but it’s cool to see this type of cloud-based storage solution in action.
You May Also Like: LeEco Le 2 Specifications
