6 ms·

Nextbit’s Robin Is Another Pretty Phone–But with Infinite Storage

47 points by slewis 11y ago

sdabdoub 11y ago
"...infinitely extensible and expandable." and hackable...
thezilch 11y ago
Not infinite storage. "Memory: 3GB RAM / 32 GB onboard / 100 GB online" [0] And given that I can get a 128GB MicroSD for <$60 (and dropping) and static media (videos, photos, etc) can already be backed by cloud storage, I just don't see the need for such technology. [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smarter-smartphone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smart...
x0054 11y ago
This company needs to seriously get out of the SF Bobble. Guess what, a lot of people in US, and throughout the rest of the world, are on limited, slow, and expensive internet connections. For instance, here in the Palm Springs area many people are lucky to get 5Mbit connections. My connection is 15 Mbit, but capped at 15gb/month. LTE is ubiquitous here, but slow as hell. What's the point of fast LTE connection from your cell to the tower, if the tower is connected to the rest of the net with 40Mbit fiber line. On the other hand, FLASH storage is dirt cheep now! You can get a 128GB SD card for $60 from Amazon. Make a phone with 3 SD Card slots, install 3 cards, run them in RAID 5 if you are paranoid, and you can have 256 (in RAID) to 384 GB on your phone. Setup your phone to auto backup at night to a NAS (this could also be a USP for a phone) and you are done. I am sorry, but cloud is not the answer for everything.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  A more charitable interpretation would be that they're not idiots and aren't targeting everyone in the world or even the US. There's nothing wrong with going after a niche, especially one that has more money to throw around.
  - x0054 11y ago
    That's true, they could be just targeting people in the major cities, and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. But would you rather have a phone that has 300GB of storage and is backed up to a NAS in your house on the daily bases (or to the cloud), or would you rather have a phone that guesses what you may need, and constantly shuffles things around. Even if you have a gigabit connection in your house, are you really comfortable with all your data AND usage patterns, being uploaded to the cloud? Seriously, flash storage, especially the slow kind, is so cheep nowadays.
- pedalpete 11y ago
  Skate to where the puck will be, not where it is today. Does that mean I think these guys have something? No. But they know that wireless data will become faster, more ubiquitous and cheaper in the coming years. If they can survive that long, they may find the killer app/opportunity that nobody else has noticed because everybody has been focused on so much running locally. At the same time, there seems to be a consistent back and forth in tech with things going local -> cloud -> local -> cloud -> local... of course with different names each time.
shenanigoat 11y ago
Cool. My phone has Google Drive.
GuiA 11y ago
I don't want more shit relying on a 1 GBps, sub millisecond latency internet connection. Even if bandwidth has gotten better in the past decade (although it's doing so logarithmically), latency is still there no matter what you do, and sadly the speed of light makes it that no matter what you do, you can't do NYC-Paris in less than 40 milliseconds. You can use tons of tricks to somewhat massage that fact, but at the end of the day the physical limit is there. Not everyone is living in your Google Fiber bubble. If you're going to design the cellphone of the future, you probably don't want the base assumption of your design to be that the user will always be in an area with high bandwidth, low latency environment, because that represents a minuscule fraction of cellphone users. Sadly, that's what happens when all of the startups are based in an echo chamber - they lose sight of the fact that not everyone has the same conditions as them. Well, tech has the nice habit of cyclically reinventing shit, so I'm glad we're going to spend a few years banging our heads against thin clients again. Homework reading for the founders and employees of this company: https://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html https://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html
- sp332 11y ago
  The size of the files here are big enough that bandwidth is more important than latency. And by default it will only happen when the phone is plugged in and connected to wifi.
  - GuiA 11y ago
    I'm basing my criticism of their vision based on statements like this one: "By connecting your phone to the Internet—not just through apps and notifications, but at every corner of the operating system [...]" And mistaken assumptions such as this one: “When iOS started development and Android started development, that was 10 years ago. Networks were much slower, Wi-Fi was much less ubiquitous, and AWS hadn’t democratized cloud to the extent that it has, right? So because of that, a lot of choices were made that result in user pain points today, which could actually be alleviated by leveraging the cloud in the way we’re doing.” Guess what, WiFi still isn't ubiquitous for 90%+ of the population that uses smartphones, and probably won't be anytime soon (think 3rd world countries, rural areas, etc.)
jtwebman 11y ago
This isn't going to be good for mobile networks that can't keep up with the usage now.
ocb 11y ago
Minus automatically deleting apps to make space, iCloud on iPhones already does pretty much everything the article says they plan to do. I'm sure something similar exists for Android (I'm not knowledgable). Also, I enjoy the use of "hard drive". Good job, technology magazine writer + editor(s).
- dublinben 11y ago
  You can similarly configure your Google Account to sync apps and data to/from your Android devices.
hackuser 11y ago
With everything synced to the cloud, apparently automatically and without user intervention (a valuable innovation), how is privacy handled?
- rodgerd 11y ago
  For companies who want to loot your information for money, privacy is a bug, not a feature.
Animats 11y ago
Under the ECPA, message data stored by the provider for more than 6 months can be accessed without a warrant. Permanent cloud storage reduces your privacy.[1] [1] http://leaksource.info/2014/08/10/loophole-in-electronic-communications-privacy-act-ecpa-allows-warrantless-search-of-emails-older-than-6-months/ http://leaksource.info/2014/08/10/loophole-in-electronic-com...
robbrown451 11y ago
What is pretty about it? It looks like an engineering prototype that hasn't had designers touch it yet.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  That is the engineering prototype. See paragraph #2.
dogma1138 11y ago
Seems that people use their "phones" the most when they might not have a solid internet connection or data connectivity at all, e.g. underground, trains, airplanes, on the toilet etc... Why the hell would i want a phone which will apparently seamlessly move my data and application from and to the cloud and use it as an expanded near-line storage? And that's without going into data caps, speed caps and latency issues as well as what the hell happens if you drop packets due to roaming or lose power or connectivity while it does it's nifty dance because either the speed will even be slower due to the additional overhead of verifying every bit and bit or you are getting into serious risk of losing data... Oh and privacy? P.S. Google Drive costs 1.99$ per month for 100GB so OnePlus/Moto X for 300(ish)$ + 4 years of 100GB Google drive come to about the costs of that phone.... If you get the new Moto G then you can get like a decade of cloud storage from Google so what's exactly is new here?
scintill76 11y ago
Is running out of space actually a problem anymore? At least, if you have an SD card slot (which might be less often on Android than it used to be), you can have 64GB for $25, and several multiples of that higher for a bit more than proportional. But if I had to guess, this phone will emphatically not have an SD card slot, because it's a "cloud phone"! If you really want to focus on storage, it seems like multiple hot-swappable SD slots might be more interesting. I recognize their vision is broader than that, but using cloud storage seemed like a big focus of the first product and of this article. Also, it seems a bit premature to make new hardware. The article says they've got the software prototype running on Nexus 5, and they've already got some level of cloud sync publicly released on CyanogenMod (maybe CM11 only). I can understand not wanting to support every rooted Android device in the world, but it seems like they could get pretty far picking 3-5 existing devices they understand and feel are solid enough. If their vision is "“You should be able to really quickly authenticate to any piece of smart glass ... and really have your stuff available to you as you need it.”" they're going to have to run on arbitrary devices at some point... unless they are defining "any piece of smart glass" as "only our hardware."
- prawn 11y ago
  We've seen attempts at modular phones, but I think that's misguided.I'd rather have an iPhone that has hot-swappable storage (SD card, as you said) for tailoring a phone to a particular situation. Sometimes I want to maximise space for storing photos, sometimes I want to switch in a music collection, or movies to watch on a plane.
dshankar 11y ago
Commenters have seemed to miss that this phone isn't designed for the "90%" that don't have WiFi. This isn't designed for African villages where electricity is spotty and LTE is non-existent. This is designed for tech-savvy parts of the world that care about having cloud-connected phones with "infinite" storage. Anyone that takes thousands of photos on their 15MP phone cameras & 1080p/4K video knows the pain of phones with limited storage. It makes no sense to say a product sucks because it sucks for groups of people that it wasn't designed for in the first place.
- scintill76 11y ago
  > Anyone that takes thousands of photos on their 15MP phone cameras & 1080p/4K video knows the pain of phones with limited storage. This doesn't really address why "the cloud", dedicated hardware, or possibly even new software are needed. Doesn't something like Dropbox handle this? (Speaking as a non-photographer and non-Dropbox user... maybe I just won't "get it" on that aspect.) If not, why can't they just make a better app solution? And why does it have to use the cloud, as opposed to your system at home, or a local SD card? If your "infinite storage" is only 100GB (and that's a perk for Kickstarter backers only!), you can get that for less than $80 on an SD card!* If you're going to spend hundreds on a new phone to put your photos in the cloud, let's hope the camera you're stuck with is decent (they claim it is.) Judging by their $500k+ worth of funding in their first day on Kickstarter(!), they've managed to sell people on this, but I'm not sure it's really about the cloud syncing (there are "enthusiasts" who would buy just for fun, maybe people like the design, and the company is supposedly committed to updating the OS over time.) I think there's something about Kickstarter that gets people to buy something they wouldn't be jumping to buy if they just saw it in the phone store. But hey, if it makes money, who cares, I guess... * Possible caveat: I often see Android phones spec'd as 64GB max SD card size. I'm not sure if that's just the most they were tested with, it's a FAT filesystem limit, etc. But if that's an actual barrier, I'd still rather see kernel patches or hardware hacks like "paging" between two 64GB virtual cards before this.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > the pain of phones with limited storage. I don't know that pain because SD cards are cheap. > This is designed for tech-savvy parts of the world Who never ever travel, apparently. I struggle to see why they're bothing to take thousands of photos, since they aren't doing anything.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
Guys this is %100 an advertisement.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

47 points by slewis 11y ago

"...infinitely extensible and expandable." and hackable...

Not infinite storage. "Memory: 3GB RAM / 32 GB onboard / 100 GB online" [0] And given that I can get a 128GB MicroSD for <$60 (and dropping) and static media (videos, photos, etc) can already be backed by cloud storage, I just don't see the need for such technology. [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smarter-smartphone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smart...

x0054 11y ago

This company needs to seriously get out of the SF Bobble. Guess what, a lot of people in US, and throughout the rest of the world, are on limited, slow, and expensive internet connections. For instance, here in the Palm Springs area many people are lucky to get 5Mbit connections. My connection is 15 Mbit, but capped at 15gb/month. LTE is ubiquitous here, but slow as hell. What's the point of fast LTE connection from your cell to the tower, if the tower is connected to the rest of the net with 40Mbit fiber line. On the other hand, FLASH storage is dirt cheep now! You can get a 128GB SD card for $60 from Amazon. Make a phone with 3 SD Card slots, install 3 cards, run them in RAID 5 if you are paranoid, and you can have 256 (in RAID) to 384 GB on your phone. Setup your phone to auto backup at night to a NAS (this could also be a USP for a phone) and you are done. I am sorry, but cloud is not the answer for everything.

brazzledazzle 11y ago
A more charitable interpretation would be that they're not idiots and aren't targeting everyone in the world or even the US. There's nothing wrong with going after a niche, especially one that has more money to throw around.
- x0054 11y ago
  That's true, they could be just targeting people in the major cities, and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. But would you rather have a phone that has 300GB of storage and is backed up to a NAS in your house on the daily bases (or to the cloud), or would you rather have a phone that guesses what you may need, and constantly shuffles things around. Even if you have a gigabit connection in your house, are you really comfortable with all your data AND usage patterns, being uploaded to the cloud? Seriously, flash storage, especially the slow kind, is so cheep nowadays.
pedalpete 11y ago
Skate to where the puck will be, not where it is today. Does that mean I think these guys have something? No. But they know that wireless data will become faster, more ubiquitous and cheaper in the coming years. If they can survive that long, they may find the killer app/opportunity that nobody else has noticed because everybody has been focused on so much running locally. At the same time, there seems to be a consistent back and forth in tech with things going local -> cloud -> local -> cloud -> local... of course with different names each time.

shenanigoat 11y ago

Cool. My phone has Google Drive.

GuiA 11y ago

I don't want more shit relying on a 1 GBps, sub millisecond latency internet connection. Even if bandwidth has gotten better in the past decade (although it's doing so logarithmically), latency is still there no matter what you do, and sadly the speed of light makes it that no matter what you do, you can't do NYC-Paris in less than 40 milliseconds. You can use tons of tricks to somewhat massage that fact, but at the end of the day the physical limit is there. Not everyone is living in your Google Fiber bubble. If you're going to design the cellphone of the future, you probably don't want the base assumption of your design to be that the user will always be in an area with high bandwidth, low latency environment, because that represents a minuscule fraction of cellphone users. Sadly, that's what happens when all of the startups are based in an echo chamber - they lose sight of the fact that not everyone has the same conditions as them. Well, tech has the nice habit of cyclically reinventing shit, so I'm glad we're going to spend a few years banging our heads against thin clients again. Homework reading for the founders and employees of this company: https://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html https://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

sp332 11y ago
The size of the files here are big enough that bandwidth is more important than latency. And by default it will only happen when the phone is plugged in and connected to wifi.
- GuiA 11y ago
  I'm basing my criticism of their vision based on statements like this one: "By connecting your phone to the Internet—not just through apps and notifications, but at every corner of the operating system [...]" And mistaken assumptions such as this one: “When iOS started development and Android started development, that was 10 years ago. Networks were much slower, Wi-Fi was much less ubiquitous, and AWS hadn’t democratized cloud to the extent that it has, right? So because of that, a lot of choices were made that result in user pain points today, which could actually be alleviated by leveraging the cloud in the way we’re doing.” Guess what, WiFi still isn't ubiquitous for 90%+ of the population that uses smartphones, and probably won't be anytime soon (think 3rd world countries, rural areas, etc.)

jtwebman 11y ago

This isn't going to be good for mobile networks that can't keep up with the usage now.

ocb 11y ago

Minus automatically deleting apps to make space, iCloud on iPhones already does pretty much everything the article says they plan to do. I'm sure something similar exists for Android (I'm not knowledgable). Also, I enjoy the use of "hard drive". Good job, technology magazine writer + editor(s).

dublinben 11y ago
You can similarly configure your Google Account to sync apps and data to/from your Android devices.

hackuser 11y ago

With everything synced to the cloud, apparently automatically and without user intervention (a valuable innovation), how is privacy handled?

rodgerd 11y ago
For companies who want to loot your information for money, privacy is a bug, not a feature.

Animats 11y ago

Under the ECPA, message data stored by the provider for more than 6 months can be accessed without a warrant. Permanent cloud storage reduces your privacy.[1] [1] http://leaksource.info/2014/08/10/loophole-in-electronic-communications-privacy-act-ecpa-allows-warrantless-search-of-emails-older-than-6-months/ http://leaksource.info/2014/08/10/loophole-in-electronic-com...

robbrown451 11y ago

What is pretty about it? It looks like an engineering prototype that hasn't had designers touch it yet.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
That is the engineering prototype. See paragraph #2.

dogma1138 11y ago

Seems that people use their "phones" the most when they might not have a solid internet connection or data connectivity at all, e.g. underground, trains, airplanes, on the toilet etc... Why the hell would i want a phone which will apparently seamlessly move my data and application from and to the cloud and use it as an expanded near-line storage? And that's without going into data caps, speed caps and latency issues as well as what the hell happens if you drop packets due to roaming or lose power or connectivity while it does it's nifty dance because either the speed will even be slower due to the additional overhead of verifying every bit and bit or you are getting into serious risk of losing data... Oh and privacy? P.S. Google Drive costs 1.99$ per month for 100GB so OnePlus/Moto X for 300(ish)$ + 4 years of 100GB Google drive come to about the costs of that phone.... If you get the new Moto G then you can get like a decade of cloud storage from Google so what's exactly is new here?

scintill76 11y ago

Is running out of space actually a problem anymore? At least, if you have an SD card slot (which might be less often on Android than it used to be), you can have 64GB for $25, and several multiples of that higher for a bit more than proportional. But if I had to guess, this phone will emphatically not have an SD card slot, because it's a "cloud phone"! If you really want to focus on storage, it seems like multiple hot-swappable SD slots might be more interesting. I recognize their vision is broader than that, but using cloud storage seemed like a big focus of the first product and of this article. Also, it seems a bit premature to make new hardware. The article says they've got the software prototype running on Nexus 5, and they've already got some level of cloud sync publicly released on CyanogenMod (maybe CM11 only). I can understand not wanting to support every rooted Android device in the world, but it seems like they could get pretty far picking 3-5 existing devices they understand and feel are solid enough. If their vision is "“You should be able to really quickly authenticate to any piece of smart glass ... and really have your stuff available to you as you need it.”" they're going to have to run on arbitrary devices at some point... unless they are defining "any piece of smart glass" as "only our hardware."

prawn 11y ago
We've seen attempts at modular phones, but I think that's misguided.I'd rather have an iPhone that has hot-swappable storage (SD card, as you said) for tailoring a phone to a particular situation. Sometimes I want to maximise space for storing photos, sometimes I want to switch in a music collection, or movies to watch on a plane.

dshankar 11y ago

Commenters have seemed to miss that this phone isn't designed for the "90%" that don't have WiFi. This isn't designed for African villages where electricity is spotty and LTE is non-existent. This is designed for tech-savvy parts of the world that care about having cloud-connected phones with "infinite" storage. Anyone that takes thousands of photos on their 15MP phone cameras & 1080p/4K video knows the pain of phones with limited storage. It makes no sense to say a product sucks because it sucks for groups of people that it wasn't designed for in the first place.

scintill76 11y ago
> Anyone that takes thousands of photos on their 15MP phone cameras & 1080p/4K video knows the pain of phones with limited storage. This doesn't really address why "the cloud", dedicated hardware, or possibly even new software are needed. Doesn't something like Dropbox handle this? (Speaking as a non-photographer and non-Dropbox user... maybe I just won't "get it" on that aspect.) If not, why can't they just make a better app solution? And why does it have to use the cloud, as opposed to your system at home, or a local SD card? If your "infinite storage" is only 100GB (and that's a perk for Kickstarter backers only!), you can get that for less than $80 on an SD card!* If you're going to spend hundreds on a new phone to put your photos in the cloud, let's hope the camera you're stuck with is decent (they claim it is.) Judging by their $500k+ worth of funding in their first day on Kickstarter(!), they've managed to sell people on this, but I'm not sure it's really about the cloud syncing (there are "enthusiasts" who would buy just for fun, maybe people like the design, and the company is supposedly committed to updating the OS over time.) I think there's something about Kickstarter that gets people to buy something they wouldn't be jumping to buy if they just saw it in the phone store. But hey, if it makes money, who cares, I guess... * Possible caveat: I often see Android phones spec'd as 64GB max SD card size. I'm not sure if that's just the most they were tested with, it's a FAT filesystem limit, etc. But if that's an actual barrier, I'd still rather see kernel patches or hardware hacks like "paging" between two 64GB virtual cards before this.
rodgerd 11y ago
> the pain of phones with limited storage. I don't know that pain because SD cards are cheap. > This is designed for tech-savvy parts of the world Who never ever travel, apparently. I struggle to see why they're bothing to take thousands of photos, since they aren't doing anything.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

Guys this is %100 an advertisement.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]