Ex-Android and HTC employees launch Robin, a “cloud-first” smartphone

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ars.AD.queue.push(["xrailTop", {sz:"300x251", kws:["bottom"], collapse: true}]);It's not often a new Android OEM comes along, but today a company called "Nextbit" is taking the wraps off of its first ever phone: the Robin. The Robin is a high-end phone launching on Kickstarter for $349 (with discounts for early birds), but the real draw of the Nextbit Robin—according to the company—is the phone's "cloud-first" software.

Nextbit's Android-based OS mixes cloud-based storage with onboard storage, giving you the onboard 32GB of storage on the phone, plus 100GBs in Nextbit's cloud. If you get close to filling up onboard storage, the software automatically moves some of your phone's data to the cloud, which frees up space. It won't just be pictures and videos moved, either—the Robin will even move apps to the cloud.

During a demo, we watched the phone backup and remove apps from the device to make room for a 4K video that was being recorded. Apps would get deleted, but the personal data would be kept on the device. Icons for the automatically-removed apps would stay on the phone as black-and-white icons. Tapping on a removed app re-downloads and installs the app from Nextbit's cloud, merges it with the personal data stored on the phone, and launches. The Robin tries to intelligently guess which apps it should move to the cloud based on your usage patterns.