Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Nextbit Robin Review: Unlimited Storage?”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the next bit 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. Anytime, you get an entire phone made by a brand new company, there’s some decisions that have to be made to put it on the map and the robin is no exception. So next bit robin is this very squared off rectangular phone with tight corners? It kind of looks a little uncomfortable at first, but it has a sort of soft touch finish and it actually feels really good in the hand it has a decent balance of weight. It’S got well fitted parts and it’s durable enough that it feels like you could hurt someone 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 protrude at all, so it can be kind of hard to tell which side is up without looking.
The fingerprint reader is actually really good, though the speed and accuracy are on point and pro tip with the side placement like this, i actually kind of like it. 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 dual 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 next bit skin which we’ll get to in a second.
But a lot of the elements still feel pretty stock. So, like the notifications, the lock screen, the quick settings etc. The specs are pretty good, too snapdragon, 808, three gigabytes of ram and a 2 680 milliamp hour battery i’d, say the performance to the specs were up to par, pretty smooth throughout, which is 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 5.2 inch 1080p display the 13 megapixel camera on the back was decent kind of reminded me of the blackberry, priv camera, actually so colors out of It were fine and detail was 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 nexbit 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 next bit skin. So every nexbit 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 32 gigs and then the robin is supposed to be smart enough and it is to offload the oldest and least frequently used stuff from the internal storage straight to the cloud when it Hasn’T been accessed in a while, so when you start to fill the 32 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 next bit launcher and, as you can see here, all these app icons there is no app drawer.
So all of your apps here are spread across all your home screens and we can talk about whether we like that or not in another video, but that’s the way it’s set up. So you can tap an app if you want to get into it and it opens right up now. You may have noticed some of the icons are grayed 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, and it takes a good second, even on solid wi-fi. But this archiving and restoring process is the big selling point for the robin.
Now. If there are apps, you use all the time that you 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’re using it 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 also dependent on the internet and buying into that next bit system and i almost wouldn’t buy this phone just for this feature. In fact, i’d 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 nexbid stuff and just use it like a normal phone toss on your launcher of choice. You can root it rom it.
The bootloader is actually unlocked out the box and they’ll support loading cyan engine mod on it or 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’d look at something with a micro sd card slot, like maybe the oneplus x, because you can go past 132 gigs. But if that’s not hugely important and you’re. Choosing between this and something like nexus 5x or oneplus 2, it’s 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 it. The way you like it now i’ll say this: if this were a normal 400 vanilla, android smartphone with a micro sd card slot, instead of the next bit cloud stuff, it might have been a hit.
But it’s cool to see this type of cloud-based storage solution in action props to next bit. I like it thanks for watching guys and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace .