Many electronics companies are trying to rival the smartphone giants by producing slight variations, but to gain traction in such competitive waters, perhaps more radical approaches are required. Now crowdfunding on Kickstarter and doubling its USD 500,000 goal, Nextbit’s “cloud-first” Robin smartphone could make for pretty good competition.
The company aims to produce a smartphone that brings the power of the cloud to anyone with an integrated cloud OS. Namely, the phones will be able to automatically offload photos, videos and apps, so local storage space will always be available. It will back up any data on users phones onto a private — and free — 100GB space on their cloud server. If a user tries to take a photo but has run out of space, the phone will automatically delete old data from its local storage — apps that never get used will be backed up and removed, replaced with a “shadow” icon, so it can be easily pulled back and restored (they will even remained logged on from the previous session). Though Google Photos and iCloud have similar functionalities on offer, the Robin phone is making the link the the cloud much more seamless, and by extending this function to apps, it offers a completely different approach to phone memory storage.
Additional features of the phone include noise-cancelling microphones, a 13-megapixel camera, LED flash, and a power key which doubles as a fingerprint sensor. Customers can now preorder a Robin smarphone for USD 349, and it will retail for USD 399. What other functionalities are common smartphones inherently missing?
Website: www.nextbit.com
Contact: hi@nextbit.com
