Gadgetory

if you've ever run out of room on your smartphone the next bit Robin should be in your crosshairs it's being built as the cloud first smartphone that makes running out of space history but does it live up to its revolutionary claims I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and we spent seven days finding out join me for our video review of the next bit robin back at CES in Las Vegas next bit told us it wanted to strike a different chord with the Robbins design and well mission accomplished the casing is a study in right angles a black or white pillar capped with mint colored bands a top and bottom breaking up all those right angles are circular accents that make the Robin a little more approachable more friendly the primary camera and flash the selfie shooter and proximity sensor the tiny raised dimples of volume controls the fingerprint sensor is rounded off to embedded within the power standby key on the right edge next bits done some interesting stuff with lights here as well the notification LED sits on the bottom edge alongside the type-c USB port while a separate set of four activity LEDs anchor the cloud logo on the back side as with all bold designs the Robin won't be for everyone the sharp edges are little tough on tender palms the fingerprint scanner is pretty small those who like edge to edge screens will be disappointed here too the Robin's 5.2 inch full HD display sits within a kind of picture-in-picture double bezel and the IPS panel itself is nothing special with somewhat low saturation and poor off angle visibility the downsides of the design aren't enough to take away from it's refreshing novelty though the Robin is a sidekick guaranteed to turn heads and next bits bold moves extend to the software as well custom third-party UI built atop Android marshmallow the launcher is very cool it's got a soft aesthetic that's consistent from the macaroni like soft keys to the soothing sound effects that come pre-loaded it's a bit like iOS and that there's no app drawer instead apps appear directly on the lawn as they're installed and while you can put your apps in folders and arrange them in any order you like you can't put widgets alongside them as on other Android phones instead there's a dedicated widget layer which you access through a pinch gesture or a long press of the multitasking key it's not our favorite implementation but it does serve to make it very easy to see which apps you have installed on the phone and which ones are currently taking a little break up in the cloud and that's really the Robins raison d'être managing the phones 25 gigs of user accessible storage is very simple because you don't manage it you just fill up the phone with as many apps photos and videos as you want and when the Robin detects it has less than 1.5 gigs left it starts offloading apps and photos to your 100 gig reservoir in next bits AWS cloud and it's not doing it randomly either it's offloading the apps and photos you access the least based on what it's learned about your usage to get an app back from the cloud you just tap on it to redownload it and it comes back with all your data so in the case of lift for example you don't need to login again as for photos even when they're archived a screen resolution copy stays on the phone so you can see it in the gallery if you want to take a closer look Robin will go fetch the full res version as soon as you pinch to zoom the Robin currently doesn't back up videos but according to next bit that'll change toward the second half of the year all this works surprisingly well but we did run into a few hiccups one day we stopped getting notifications on our paired pebble and we quickly realized the Robin had archived our pebble app to make room fortunately there's a simple fix for that you can pin any app you want to prevent it from being archived another minor thing the phone tends to randomly move apps around the home screen when it archives them which is annoying there's a bit of a delay in certain corners of the OS like the app lists that keep track of what's archived and what's pinned and for some reason the uber app won't run on our device it crashes on startup every speaking of things that don't work exactly the way they should the robin packs a 13 megapixel camera a sensor from samsung and while the hardware seems capable enough the software isn't where it needs to be the robbins viewfinder is well laid out with a few handy manual controls but it's also slow to launch slow to focus and slow to capture on the bright side it's certainly possible to get some nice-looking if somewhat noisy photos out of this phone and we were pleasantly surprised by its performance in less than ideal lighting but thanks to the lag the process of taking those photos isn't much fun at all and selfie shots with the 5 megapixel front-facing camera have so much grain well they look like they've got a filter on them or something the good news is that next bit knows it has work to do on the camera which also includes fixing a bug with video stabilization that's why we didn't test video much the company is anticipating that Robin's first system-wide software update will land in April and if you don't want to wait there's more good news the Robin comes with an unlocked bootloader open source drivers and possibly the most forgiving warranty in existence tinker away you've got next bits blessing to load any custom ROM you want the phone is still covered even if you brick it we've spent the past 7 days on t-mobile us seeing how the phone performs between Greater Boston New York City and Rural Long Island during that time voice calls on our end have been clear and crisp the colors were able to hear the sound of auto traffic at one point while we walk down a busy city sidewalk the Robins powered by a Snapdragon 808 made it to three gigs of ram enough to run graphics heavy games like asphalt 8 though like most 808 powered phones it does get pretty warm under a load the front-facing speakers make Netflix binges really enjoyable they don't pack the sheer amplitude to the Moto X and they're not quite as dynamic as the HTC One but they're better than the vast majority of smart phone speakers and finally while the Robin is capable of quick charging via a special one-and-a-half amp wall wart you won't find that charger included in the box next but assumes that you probably have a wall charger of your own left over from a previous phone so only a charging cable comes with the Robin the $10 quick charger might be a worthwhile investment if you're planning on anything close to heavy use because the Robins battery is by no means a road warrior on our best day we managed about three and a half hours of screen on time over 12 hours of moderate use when I first went hands-on with the next bit Robin I worried that it was a one-trick pony phone that relied too heavily on one killer feature to stand out after a week of usage I still think that's true but I also think I severely underestimated just how killer that one feature is having a phone that effectively never runs out of storage is really really cool and the fact that it achieves that while remaining very simple to operate is even more impressive if you didn't get in early with the Kickstarter campaign the Robin will run you $399 unlocked it's not the cheapest smartphone around given its camera shortcomings it's certainly not a device I'd recommend to everyone but on the cusp of yet another wave of minor iteration from some of the big players the Robin is a refreshing alternative to the modern smartphone that solves one of the most common smartphone frustrations attention mobile industry more like this please to see what kind of competition the next bit Robin is going up against see our related reviews here on YouTube and stay tuned to pocket now as we tackle MWC 2016 in Barcelona starting February 21 until next time this has been michael fisher captain two phones on twitter reminding you to only pin the stuff you need archived all the rest thanks for watching everyone we'll see you on the flip side of the cloud