Nextbit Robin Review – Simplicity On A New Perspective

Innovating in a market as competitive as the smartphone market is tricky, to say the least, it’s a market that has seen plenty of ideas coming with various degrees of success. With ideas such as inductive charging, 41-megapixel cameras, curved screens and even pico projectors, or features with high acceptance, such as Quick Charge 2.0 and fingerprint scanners in all places imaginable. All of these with the intention of adding value to them and taking smartphones one step further to make them become our all-in-one tool and stop carrying other devices with us on our daily life. However, all these features come from hardware incorporations, features added software-wise usually require a considerable amount of vision to make them become something useful, but what’s even harder, is to add features to software that you wonder later how did you use your devices without them. After a few months of tinkering and getting their devices ready for massive commercialisation, the Nextbit Robin wants to tackle one of the quirkiest gripes of smartphones in the recent years: storage space, and for what I’ve seen, I think they’re getting it right.

The Nextbit Robin is a device conceived to stand out from a crowd of slim devices with minimal bezels and multi-core processors that doesn’t say much to a user unless they spend a lot of time with it to figure out why it matters. The Nextbit Robin is made to be memorable, is one of the prettiest designs we’ve seen for a smartphone in a while, staying away from the aluminum, curved feel tendency and bringing something cleaner, that reflects the mindset which it was built upon. The Nextbit Robin presents a simple rectangle design with circles indicating where the speakers, camera, and sensors are placed. It also comes in two color combinations, mint for the outgoing users and midnight for the more conservative ones. Being 7mm-thin, it gives the phone a slim profile, but at 149mm height and 72mm width, it’s quite noticeable to have in your pocket.

Hardware wise, the Nextbit Robin incorporates a 5.2-inch 1080p LCD screen with a Snapdragon 808 processor and an Adreno 418 GPU, which is very capable for a mid-range smartphone. It also incorporates a fingerprint scanner, which is incorporated where the Power button is. You just need to press the button, and it’ll scan the finger used to press the button, it works well and is a very thoughtful design to cut a step in the process of unlocking the device. It also includes NFC connectivity, and a USB Type-C port with Quick Charge 2.0, however, it doesn’t come with a wall adapter to provide said functionality, which is a bummer.

The Nextbit Robin comes with 3GB of RAM, 32GB of onboard storage capacity and 100GB of cloud backup services on Nextbit servers. The software which runs on it is designed to backup your photos and less-used apps to make space available to keep it working at its finest. The software leaves a low-resolution copy of the pictures and downloads the full version when you try to watch them. It’s a very seamless process for photos, but I can’t say the same about apps, which I would prefer to be disabled, rather than removed from my device. That way I can keep a basic copy of my app functioning while updates get downloaded to my Nextbit Robin, you can manually select which apps are always kept regardless of the usage of them. The device includes 4 LED lights that are turned on when the device is backing up files to the cloud. Adding music and video support would be a nice thing to have in the future, I’d keep low versions of the songs and videos in smart formats (such as HE-AAC for audio and x265 for videos, to name a few) and being able to get back the full version if needed by selecting them as favorites, a la Dropbox. Having the slimming made in this kind of media as well would be much more satisfying than it is on apps.

Performance-wise, the Nextbit Robin did very well on our tests, having very few lag moments while browsing through the interface and using the included apps. The disappearance of the app drawer is quite confusing for long-time Android users, as the Nextbit home software adds downloaded apps automatically to the home page, which will make users coming from iOS devices feel at home, but it is a little nuisance compared to not being able to place widgets alongside apps. Nextbit decided to add a panel specifically for widget handling, for the sake of simplifying the experience, and while said panel is a gesture away, it seems a bit unnecessary. We want to make a special mention to the encouragement that Nextbit has made for openness in the software that runs on the device. With a warranty that covers it without worrying what kind of Android flavor is being run on the device or if it’s rooted or not, is a very welcomed move for Android enthusiasts that like to tinker a bit more on the capabilities of their devices.

We were pleased to see that Nextbit fixed the launch quirks of the Nextbit Robin and it’s making good use of the 13-megapixel rear camera, that incorporates Phase Detection Auto Focus, which gave us very good results in both outdoor and low-light conditions, showing little traces of noise in the captured images and when capturing video at full resolution. The images taken have a very good color reproduction and presented good levels of contrast and exposure in both scenarios. Shutter time was a bit slower than we wished for while having the HDR mode on, but the images that were captured with it made it worth the slight waiting time. The front camera worked well for quick selfie photos, but it was a bit noisier than the rear camera. It’s good to note that Nextbit is making an effort in the right places software-wise, as the launch issues that plagued the camera app made difficult to appreciate the value of having a service that automatically saves the photos you take to the cloud. Having your device ready to take another round of photos without thinking about storage available is something really appreciated on vacations or long trips when multiple photos are taken and not reviewed until later, which is part of the simplicity that Nextbit wants to offer.

All things considered, we can say that the Nextbit Robin is a great overall smartphone that provides innovation in the right places, designed with a simple and open philosophy that inspires trust on a brand that’s just starting to grow, and one that we would like to hear from soon.

Get it from Amazon