Nextbit

Apparently there's going to be a Razer Phone at some point in the near future, and you're going to want to buy one. Today I'm going to run down five reasons why a person might want a Razer Phone paired with 5 reasons why the Razer Phone might not be the best purchase right out the gate. Negative factors in this adventure of a release are largely related to Razer's relative lack of experience in this field. Positives have largely to do with Razer's relative good standing in several fields, including laptop and peripheral manufacturing as well as established brand and community power.

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The writing has been on the wall for months now so this doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, Nextbit is no longer the captain of its own ship, not after gaming accessory maker Razer bought it in January. Since then, Nextbit, or Razer, has slowly been closing doors. By the end of the month, the second to the last door will also be closed, with Nextbit ending most of its support channels once and for all.

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Smartphone maker Nextbit has been bought by Razer, and though owners have been promised Android updates at least for the moment, new phones may not be in the pipeline. The news sees Nextbit's 30-strong team joining Razer's staff, where according to CEO and co-founder Tom Moss, it will continue to operate as an independent division. Indeed, execs at the smartphone startup are spinning the news as a net-positive.

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It’s almost unbelievable that the Nextbit Robin has managed to survive for seven months now. For a relatively unknown brand that brought cloud storage to a new, and still debated, level, that’s no small achievement indeed. To mark its “monthsary”, Nextbit sent out surveys to ask their users’ feedback so far. The results are somewhat interesting, reflecting the habits of mobile users, especially when you give them lots and lots of storage, both for data as well as for apps.

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Summer is here, at least for those in the northern half of the globe. The season brings images of beaches, sun, and, red. That's precisely why Nextbit is taking the opportunity to launch a new shade for its so far one and only smartphone. Appropriately called "Ember", this Nextbit Robin in red has all the things that made the smartphone interesting and adds an interesting color choice to it. Plus, beta testers are getting an early taste of the promised cloud smart storage support for videos, ensuring they won't run out of space recording all that summer fun and mayhem.

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This week the folks at Nextbit have decided to attack smartphone batteries. They've decided this, apparently, after feeling justified in their aim for a more cloud-friendly universe after both Google and Apple have pushed their own cloud storage initiatives with more Google Photos storage and Apple's "store in iCloud" for macOS. Now Nextbit wants to make the smartphone battery - its relatively short life, in particular - a thing of the past. They want to make your phone last a lot longer.

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Many smartphone fans who liked what Nextbit was offering with its Robin smartphone who didn’t live in the US or India were a bit bummed when those two countries could get the device on a significant discount. Originally Amazon offered the $399 device on a discount of $100 making the purchase price $299. For a while that was cheaper than Nextbit's own online store.

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The Nextbit Robin, the Android-powered smartphone with a focus on storing unnecessary content in the cloud instead of locally, has landed on Amazon, giving those who missed the successful $1.36 million Kickstarter a chance to pick one up. And there's a great incentive to buy it on Amazon too: it's available for $100 off the regular asking price, but only from today, May 4th, through May 10th.

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Smartphone cameras have become so important these days that almost every notable flagship gets or awaits an appraisal from the likes of DxOMark. That said, not all new smartphones make a wave on the excitement scale, either because the device doesn't even have the hardware for a decent test or, sometimes, because the manufacturer has its focus elsewhere. The Nextbit Robin might be a prime example for the latter. Considering the novelty of the idea, Nextbit is spending its attention and resources on the smartphone's cloud spiel. So imagine the slight surprise in finding out its camera is quite capable as well.

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Bad news if you wanted a Nextbit Robin smartphone to use with Verizon or Sprint, as the Android device-making startup has axed plans for its CDMA phone. The news was confirmed this morning, with Nextbit - which raised over $1.3m late in 2015 on Kickstarter for its vision of a cloud-storage focused handset - admitting it would have to refund backers who had wanted the CDMA version.

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The NextBit Robin smartphone may be the first in a new era of smartphone - far more trusting in its creator. Or it could be a mistake, holding on to the cloud when the public continues to fear the worst - hiding their data in their mattresses instead of allowing the data banks to do their job with security. Then there's the NextBit Robin's hardware design. It's gorgeous. It looks like the sort of hardware you'd find in a museum under "historic groundbreakers in industrial design." It looks like someone contacted the finest designers of the 1960's, each of them bent on making all things as visible as they were functional, and told them to imagine a smartphone.

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Day 1 with the Nextbit Robin, a smartphone that puts unused apps and media in the cloud to keep the burden of storage off its user. I'm already impressed. Instead of attempting to create another unit that more of less drives toward smartphone aesthetic singularity, this device has a strong, blatantly design-conscious look. It's not for everyone. It's not even for most people. This device is not meant to do battle with Apple and/or Samsung. And it's not going to do battle with either one. Instead, this device is doing something unique.

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