Nextbit’s Robin smartphone is the first cloud phone — offers users 100GB of storage

Billed as the “smarter smartphone”, Nextbit’s Robin device may have very well just figured out a way to provide users with more storage space in a phone that costs much less than its competitors.

The company was founded a little over a year ago by HTC and early Android veterans and funded with $18 million dollars for something secret but “awesome”. Well, after weeks of Twitter teases, it appears as though the secret’s now out, and the details of the company’s flagship device are published on Robin’s kickstarter funding page (which, it should be noted, will now serve simply as a product information page for the remainder of its campaign, what with the device having achieved its $500,000 benchmark funding goal in the first few hours it was listed).

Hold Robin in your hand and it feels and looks like any other $300 Android phone. So what makes it such an appealing device? Robin’s main selling point is the fact that it is supported by the cloud for storage purposes. The device itself comes with 32GB of storage. As this is filled with photos, videos, and apps, the phone will automatically back up older files on to a personal 100GB cloud, and grey-out the icon where it once existed. When a user wants to re-access this cloud-stored file, they need only click the icon to retrieve it.

What’s particularly noteworthy about this approach is the bit of intelligence included with the automatic back-up. You see, the phone won’t back-up files at random times in the middle of the day (thereby chewing through your data limit and draining your battery); rather, it’ll learn your behaviors and when it’s established times in the day where you’re plugged into a power source and connected to the Internet via WiFi, it’ll back everything up then. 

The Robin approach is a nice alternative to other cloud systems like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and DropBox, all of which require a bit more user interaction to set these systems up. Obviously, it’s also a much better solution to the headache-inducing task of having to manually delete photos, videos, and apps when space starts getting tight. 

In addition to this headline-grabbing feature, the phone itself boasts some pretty impressive specs. It features an all-plastic chassis with two color options, a 5.2-inch 1080p screen, Qualcomm hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processer, rear-based 13MP camera, 3GB of RAM and a 2,680mAh battery. The phone also uses a USB Type-C port for charging, features NFC and Bluetooth functionality, a fingerprint scanner, and front-facing speakers. 

The Nextbit team has already come out and said the 100GB cloud storage is not a scam and that users will need not sign up for any sort of subscription service later on to maintain their cloud; to the contrary, the team said that if they’re able to get enough people to purchase their phone, they may very well increase the storage capacity of each user’s cloud a bit more down the road.

The aforementioned Kickstarter campaign will conclude a month from now. Early backers can get the phone for $299. The standard backing price after this benchmark is achieved will be $349; when it hits store shelves, it’ll retail for $399. Per the latter point, when it does officially go public, it will come unlocked and compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile. 

Shipping is expected to start January 2016.

Visit the Nextbit Robin Kickstarter page to learn more or to place your order.