In a sea of black, grey, metal and glass phones, the Nextbit Robin's mint and white colour scheme and polycarbonate body make it stand out. Its sides are perfect angles, no gentle curvature here, and the back features a camera and a cloud symbol with a set of small LED lights below them. Apart from the quirky design, these lights are the design elements that hint that the Robin is not your average smartphone; but we'll come back to that.
On the specs front, the Robin is not going to shake up the established order. The processor is a par-for-the-course Snapdragon 808, and the same can be said about the 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB inbuilt storage, and 2,680 mAh battery. The display is a 5.2-inch one, which leads to the device being pretty easy to use. Nextbit have struck a nice balance on the specs, design and form factor front, and the Robin is a device that would appeal to pretty much anyone on the lookout for a new phone.
Another feature that Nextbit has left out of the Robin is a microSD card, but this decision is more understandable. As mentioned before, this is not an ordinary phone, and ordinary storage is not its thing. The Robin comes with 100 GB of free cloud storage, and this is not just for files and music to be backed up, but apps as well. The Robin has the ability to smartly backup least-used apps on to the cloud when the phone is charging and connected to WiFi, which frees up space on the device. Backed up apps appear grey within the phone's interface, and a tap on them will immediately retrieve them from the cloud. This is not the same as uninstallation, and does not take too long, though having a reasonably fast connection is advisable. Users also have the option of pinning apps that they want available at all times, preventing them from being sent to the cloud. The four LEDs at the rear of the phone indicate backups in progress and the amount of cloud storage left available to the user.
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Phone manufacturers are still toying between expanding inbuilt storage and developing ultra-fast removable storage, and at this juncture the Robin is a bold statement. How it pans out is yet to be seen, as other manufacturers have not scrambled to come up with similar devices yet.
The interface of the Robin features a lot of translucent elements and foregoes a conventional app drawer. There is a persistent icon on the bottom right that follows you between homescreen panes and allows you to pin apps and access your entire app collection, but this implementation came across as slightly strange. While these little omissions are by no means dealbreakers, Nextbit's implementation of widgets is a little baffling. You can add widgets, but instead of residing on the homescreen with other icons, they live in a separate plane that can be accessed by a zoom-out gesture from the homescreen. Such bizarre interface choices are likely to lead most purists to install a third-party app launcher from the Play store.
On the camera department, the phone comes with 13MP and 5MP shooters on the back and front respectively. Camera quality was decent, if unspectacular, and the Robin did struggle in some dimly-lit situations. The software does include a manual mode however, so you can tinker a little to try and get a better shot.
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All said and done the Robin comes across as a phone ahead of its time.
The hardware package, design and Rs. 20,000 price point would appeal to a huge chunk of Android users, with the design and cloud features in particular giving the phone a certain hipster cred that would see many takers. But it is let down by some unnecessary interface choices and a less than stellar camera.