Hey, how's it going guys?
This is Dave2D 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 hollow-er 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 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 be-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
Dave2D