Nextbit Robin (Unlocked) Review - Review 2022

"Ooh, that'south pretty." I almost never hear that nearly Android phones. Information technology'south not that they're bad-looking; information technology's that conservatism generally reigns supreme. The Nextbit Robin ($399) breaks the mold. It'due south the nearly attractive Android phone on the market, although you lot're paying for the standout blueprint. It'south as well a high-quality, unlocked phone from a team that includes Google and HTC alumni. If you're interested, you need to exist on board with the progressive Robin experience, which offloads your information to cloud storage when the phone's internal storage is full. Yous besides need to trust that the company will fix bugs and evangelize upgrades with time.

Design and Features
Nada is truly original. The Robin'due south design owes a bit to Nokia's work in brightly colored polycarbonate, but it has a more than rectangular body than any Lumia ever did. It comes in two designs: i is calorie-free blue with white sides and a white back, and the other is night bluish all around with a light blue power button. The dual forepart-facing speakers are a very HTC bear upon, although it's initially distracting that the lesser ane isn't a home button. You lot have to swipe up on the display to become Marshmallow's virtual domicile push button.

At five.9 by 2.8 past 0.3 inches (HWD) and 5.3 ounces, the Robin is not a small telephone. The pretty much standard-event v.2-inch, 1080p IPS LCD has very petty side bezel, just those front-facing speakers take upward a lot of room on the acme and lesser. The matte body feels smooth, and not at all slippery.

The ability push on the right side, next to the nano SIM menu slot, doubles as a fingerprint scanner, and information technology'south super-fast and accurate. It's faster than any of Samsung's current fingerprint scanners; in one case I set up my fingerprint, waking up the phone was so instantaneous that I wondered if information technology was doing the fingerprint check at all. (It was.)

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On the back, there are iv piddling lights below a Nextbit cloud logo that pulse when the telephone is uploading or downloading data to cloud storage.

The phone comes with a flat, tangle-gratuitous USB-A-to-USB-C cable in a gorgeous light blue. Information technology only transfers data at USB 2.0 speeds, though the Robin'south port supports USB iii.0. And both the cable and the phone back up Qualcomm Quick Accuse 2.0. Additional cables price $15-20 based on length. The phone doesn't come up with an AC adapter; you can buy one for $15. The company also sells iii different varieties of cases for $15, $25 and $35, as well as screen protectors for $fifteen and $25.

Nextbit'southward Cloud
If you buy this phone, y'all'll have to take faith in Nextbit. That's very visible in the way Nextbit'south cloud works.

In fact, Nextbit'southward deject is the flagship feature of the device: the phone automatically offloads upwardly to 100GB of deject storage when its 25GB of bachelor on-device storage (32GB total) is full. You tin toggle whether this happens only on Wi-Fi, and/or whether information technology happens just when y'all're connected to a charger. If you lot turn off the Just on Wi-Fi option, you'll really requite your data plan a workout.

I slugged a bunch of large apps and several gigabytes of movies and music into the phone. When I added plenty to reduce the storage to well-nigh 2.2GB, the telephone started shuffling apps into the cloud, alerting me that I had saved 530MB of storage. When the apps were in the cloud, their icons became gray. Tapping on a gray icon reloads it from the cloud storage. This also works for photos, which store a lower-resolution copy on the device and keep the full copy in the cloud.

Nextbit Rbin

But right now the deject arrangement only works for apps and photos. It doesn't work for music or videos, and it doesn't back up your app data and game levels (which stay on the phone when the app has been offloaded). Nextbit is working on all of these things, execs say. I think offloading music would be a huge boon for those of united states of america who oasis't gone to a primarily streaming lifestyle.

Android and Performance
The Nextbit Robin runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, with an update to vi.0.i in the works. It has a pretty intense launcher skin, but Nextbit is very publicly hack-friendly—the Robin has an unlocked bootloader and Nextbit encourages you to root your telephone and install whatever you want. The cloud-based offloading feature works with alternative launchers similar Google At present and Nova, merely not entirely different ROMs like Cyanogen.

The telephone's lock screen is gorgeous, with a simple, elegant clock. The launcher's custom icons are likewise elegant, with a bold and minimalist design. (Did I mention the phone was designed by HTC alums?) But Nextbit jumps on the Huawei bandwagon of ditching widgets and the app drawer, and making the dwelling house screen an iPhone-like, rearrangeable listing of icons. Y'all tin can motion them around and put them in folders. If you pinch, you then become a 2d overlay screen y'all can drib Android widgets onto, but that defeats one of the primal points of widgets, which is that they're supposed to exist right in that location. That'south one reason I like Android more than iOS, which requires an extra swipe down to encounter your notification widgets. There's too an annoyingly persistent app-sorting icon that takes up the lower right position in the 4-by-iv app grid, and can't be moved or removed.

Functioning-wise, the phone has a 1.8GHz Snapdragon 808 processor with 3GB of RAM and few surprises. It kills lower-cease devices like the Huawei Honor 5X and the LG G Vista 2 on benchmarks, merely it isn't form-leading. Gaming performance is fine, although I've seen better; at that place's more often than not a bit of load delay in super-intensive games like Asphalt 8. With 39fps in the GFXBench T-Rex examination, information technology can handle the frames that games are putting out.

For a phone that's then passionately cloud-based, I wasn't thrilled by the Robin's LTE or Wi-Fi performance. I compared it with the Samsung Galaxy Note v, which has impeccable RF performance. On LTE, I got -iv to -5dBm of ameliorate on the Note 5, which could brand the difference betwixt making a phone call and non. Moreover, while the Robin has dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, I consistently got slower Wi-Fi speeds on the Robin connected to our 100Mbps Verizon FiOS test router than I did on the Notation 5. The Robin had no problem getting x-20Mbps downwardly on Wi-Fi, fifty-fifty at xl feet from the router, but I couldn't reach higher speeds while the Note 5 had no problem showing lxx+Mbps down.

Nextbit Robin Side

That said, I'yard more than than pleased with the Robin'southward broad LTE banding, which outpaces similar phones like the OnePlus 2 in carrier compatibility. The Robin has LTE bands 1/2/3/iv/5/7/viii/12/17/twenty/28, which covers y'all for AT&T, T-Mobile, Canada, Europe, and some of Asia. The only ones missing are AT&T's new bands 29 and 30, which information technology isn't really using yet. OnePlus splits these bands upwards into regional models, then yous never have all of them in one unit.

The phone supports vocalisation-over-LTE (VoLTE), merely not Wi-Fi calling, and information technology has Bluetooth iv.one LE and NFC for pairing. Telephone call quality is very good. The earpiece is really powerful, and phonation quality is rich, especially with vocalisation-over-LTE. Noise cancellation is generally solid; it has some small issues with air current noise, but most phones do. The speakerphone is as well top-notch.

The telephone's 2,680mAh battery lasted for five hours, 56 minutes of full-screen LTE video streaming, which is good merely non extraordinary. It'south a scrap better than the OnePlus ii (v hours, 19 minutes), but much shorter than the Note five (7 hours, 35 minutes).

Photos and Multimedia
The Robin's dual front-facing speakers promise serious audio. They deliver, although they need to be fine-tuned. Most of the notches on the book slider increment the volume by ii-3dB, merely the very final one jumps past 7dB and makes the speakers clip. That's fixable in the firmware.

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The telephone has a custom camera app with some manual controls. It sometimes didn't choose the about sensible auto-exposures (frequently picking a bright background to a dark foreground), but tapping for manual exposure fixed that. The main camera is super-sharp in expert lighting and decent in low light, although low-light images tin can be quite noisy. The front-facing camera tends to blow things out with brightness outdoors and get noisy in low calorie-free. In that location'southward an HDR option that takes articulate photos, simply it has a shutter lag problems that Nextbit says it's fixing.

The main camera records 4K video at 30 frames per 2d, and the forepart camera records 1080p video at 30 frames per second, with both clinging badly to those 30fps every bit the lights go down, making videos noisier and noisier until they black out. I actually prefer that to the other option, which is cutting the frame rate to maintain sharpness. 4K video is pretty noisy in whatever indoor situation, then I'd suggest sticking to 1080p. Slow-movement video and panorama features are coming in an upcoming firmware update, Nextbit says.

Otherwise, music and video playback through the Robin is fine. There's no wired way to hook it upward to a big screen (for now, at least), although the phone supports wireless screencasting.

Conclusions
Are you comfortable with paying for design? If not, cease reading, you're washed here. The $399 Nextbit Robin is out-specced past the $349 OnePlus 2, and certainly by the beastly Moto X Pure Edition, amid other unlocked phones. You're paying a premium for pattern here. And it's definitely a work in progress; everything from the Robin'south camera modes to its much-vaunted cloud offloading are evolving.

But the Robin stands out. Unlike the OnePlus ii, it won't be mistaken for any other phone, and different the Moto X Pure, the design is tasteful and refined. Unsurprisingly given Nextbit'due south HTC pedigree, the phone makes me think of the HTC One A9, another phone that manages to outweigh its specs because of its design.

There are a lot of questions effectually Nextbit that are like to the questions around OnePlus. Will the company deliver software updates on a regular ground? Volition it exist able to make enough phones? Nexbit will only offer 6,000 devices to start, but told me, "We are working to bring our capacity to meet demand before this becomes an issue. Nosotros are not trying to limit availability." Can information technology live up to that hope? I've known some of the Nextbit team for a long time, and they're passionate, competent, and experienced. Notwithstanding, let's make sure they can produce and update phones before y'all drop $400 for one. I'm giving the Robin a good rating, simply proceed with circumspection.