Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my review of the next fit Robin so for the uninitiated the Robin is a smartphone it's a cloud-based smartphone that was created by 2x Google employees they had a Kickstarter campaign it was wildly successful and somehow not only did they finish the product but they did it on time which is crazy for a Kickstarter project here's my review it's a very boxy phone there's no curves it's pretty minimal and yet somehow it looks awesome now I'm not going to go as far as to call it premium because to me it just doesn't look or feel premium that's just the nature of plastic but I do think it's a very smart looking phone and I totally dig that minimal design it fits comfortably in one hand the edges are slightly rounded off so there's no sharp corners or anything the original renders of the phone on the Kickstarter page looked a little too cutesy to me but I think the final product looks and feels fantastic for the few weeks I've used this I've had no case on it so it's a little slippery I actually dropped it in the corner of the phone put a dent in my wood floor the good news is that the phone itself didn't even scuff the polycarbonate body still looks brand new but the better news is that the robots at D brand actually made some skins for this thing that fit it really well and they look awesome there's a link to their skins in the video description below all right going around the phone on the left side we have volume up and down buttons on the top of the phone we have the headphone jack and one of the mics on the right we have a nano SIM slot and the side mounted fingerprint sensor it's the same sensor as the one on the Sony z5 it's accurate its reliable and it's fast it feels just as fast as the iPhone 6s or the Nexus 6p on the back we have a 13 megapixel camera it's using the Samsung 3 m2 sensor which has phase detection for autofocus it's the same sensor that's in the Oppo r7 and the oneplus X it's a pretty good camera but it's not amazing so pictures taken in bright light focus quickly and they come out nice good colors nice and sharp but the pictures taken in dim light are okay there are noticeably worse than the low-light photos of top-tier smartphones but it's not bad and this is something that maybe improved over time with soft we're like we've seen with other Android devices it also shoots 4k video there is no image stabilization but it can shoot for a long time without overheating on the bottom we have a USB C port a notification LED and a second microphone the call quality is clean but it's nothing super special the front of the device has dual front-facing speakers with drivers in each of them and they sound pretty good they sound very similar to the Nexus 6p in terms of volume but with a slightly ha lower sound quality the 5 megapixel front-facing camera is also a decent shooter the display is a 5.2 inch 1080p IPS panel and it's covered in Gorilla Glass 4 I don't love that black trim surrounding the panel but contrast and viewing angles are good colors look good is not heavily oversaturated and it gets pretty bright it's a solid screen for the price performance wise it's running the very well-known Snapdragon 808 with 3 gigs of RAM I've always liked this chip especially for this screen resolution it's a strong performer everything feels pretty zippy except for some super demanding games the Robin is running Android marshmallow 6.0 with an X bit OS interface there's a few changes like some of the stock icons are different the way the widgets are pulled up is different and there's an icon to help you organize and pull up apps but the UI feels pretty stuck the biggest change is that they've included a lot of different ringtones ok no I'm kidding the biggest change is obviously behind the scenes where they've done a bunch of stuff to make it hard for you to run out of space and they do this by connecting you to their cloud when I first saw pictures of this phone I thought that these lights were like a battery life indicator but what they actually do is that they light up when the phone is interacting with the cloud so if you're transmitting or receiving data from the cloud the lights sway back and forth and it has the soothing hypnotic timing now things like Google Drive and Dropbox already doing a decent job at the whole cloud thing so what does the Robin do differently on a regular phone if you download a large app or you film too much 4k video your run out of room and you'll have to manually offload files to the cloud but on the Robin let's say you have a ton of apps and games and video files on your phone and you've used up almost all of your 32 gigs of storage on the phone every time you use an app it gets pulled up to the top of the list so absolutely use a lot will float to the top and then apps that use and frequently will sink to the bottom now let's say you download a huge app that puts you over that 32 gig limit that file that you haven't used in six months will automatically get sent to the cloud to make room for this new app and if you ever delete something on your device and you want to use that file in the cloud it'll pull it back now the application icons turn gray when they're stored in the cloud but when you retrieve them the colors come back pictures that haven't been used or viewed for a while have these really small versions stored on the phone and when you access them or zoom into them they'll download the full-size version from the cloud it works fluidly but it's still a little slow and if you're trying to view a whole series of pictures that you haven't viewed in a while it's a sluggish experience even on Wi-Fi so I used the Robin as my daily driver for a couple of weeks and sent probably a hundred gigs of files back and forth with a cloud to test it and everything worked really smooth like the cloud features feel nicely polished again it's not nearly as fast as I want it to be but the software is on point on the default settings the Robin will only interact with the cloud on Wi-Fi just to keep your phone bill low and to save battery life and it does a decent job it's a twenty six eighty milliamp hour battery that supports Qualcomm quick charge it'll charge from zero to sixty percent in about thirty minutes when you're doing a lot of heavy interaction with the cloud it drains batteries quickly so each one of these battery drops on the graph was when I was offloading like eight to ten gigs of apps to the cloud but when you use it normally with only some mild cloud interaction it should comfortably last you a full day screen on time is around three and a half to four hours of regular use on a full charge ok the next bit Robin it's a polycarbonate phone with solid build quality and surprisingly good stereo speakers it has a 5.2 inch 1080p display with good colors and brightness and it's covered in Gorilla Glass 4 it's got a decent 5 megapixel front facing camera on the back we have some LEDs that light up to show cloud interaction and there's a 13 megapixel camera that takes good photos when there's lots of light and ok photos when there's less light on the inside we have a Snapdragon 808 with three gigs of RAM it's a strong performer unless you're playing some really demanding games there's 32 gigs of internal storage with an elegantly integrated hundred gigs of cloud storage and lastly there's a 26 and our battery that supports quick charging which will comfortably last a day if you're not going crazy with cloud pushes and retrievals over the past few weeks I've pushed a lot of data to and from their cloud I think I see what next bit was going for and I can kind of see a future where cloud-based phones are the norm but we're not at the stage yet where a cloud-based phone is going to be more efficient than something like an SD card simply because cards are super cheap and super available and cellular data isn't cheap or fast enough yet that being said I am stunned at how good this phone is I mean partially I had really low expectations because it was a Kickstarter phone but it's also just a really good phone the camera could use a little bit of work but the hardware is really good the software is really good and the cloud integration is fantastic it's super tight it's super fluid and I'm just surprised that they were able to create something like this in their first generation on their first shot like that's nuts so kudos to them as for its value it's a $400 price tag it's obviously not like the cheapest or best value phone at this price point but it's a really solid piece of hardware and you're getting a unique feature that you can use or skip if you don't want to use it quite yet and yeah if you're looking for a $400 phone or just a phone in this price point I'd take a look at this one it's pretty cool that's the honest review hope you guys liked it thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time