

Nextbit’s Robin Is Another Pretty Phone–But with Infinite Storage - slewis
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/nextbit-robin/

======
GuiA
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)

~~~
skuhn
The odd thing to me is that these guys live in San Francisco (I met most of
them a few years ago). Wi-Fi is not ubiquitous here, Google Fiber will never
be deployed here and most of the city only has Comcast as a real option. Their
service is as good as their reputation would lead you to expect. Nextbit
should know first hand that the world is not a well connected mesh of low
latency, high bandwidth, and quota free connections.

The idea of loading what the phone thinks you'll need into its local storage
is intriguing, and people keep trying to make it work to varying degrees. I
don't think it has ever, or can ever, work simply because of the massive
constraints it puts on usage. Even if the phone is right 99% of the time, the
first time I need to use Google Maps and its been "uploaded" off of my phone,
it's going in the trash. Just the thought that such a thing might happen and
be beyond my control makes me disinclined to give it a shot (not that I would
ever own an Android phone anyway, so no sale lost).

I think that devices that try to anticipate the user's wishes and plan ahead,
but which may make decisions that have negative consequences, violate the
user's trust. I expect technology to do what I have asked it to do -- in this
case, I asked it to store something and it thought better of that.

I don't really understand their cloud storage model either. 100GB on S3 for 3
years is $99 -- not counting bandwidth and EC2 instances, which is what really
racks up the bill. People aren't going to use their entire allotment all the
time, but this ongoing cost is going to sink the company.

~~~
dexterdog
You average user doesn't have close to 100GB to store and when you dedupe the
big media files that drops even more. Hell, Amazon is doing unlimited storage
for consumers for $70/year already and that's not just for phones.

~~~
untog
Your average user doesn't have close to 100GB, but your average user also has
no use for an infinite storage service like this. So their average user will
not be the average user.

~~~
dexterdog
Selling it as infinite is great for people like us that want that, but is also
one less thing to worry about for the gut who doesn't need that much space.
Infinite is better than even 100TB to the average Joe.

------
thezilch
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-
smart...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smarter-
smartphone)

------
x0054
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
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
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.

------
Animats
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-
com...](http://leaksource.info/2014/08/10/loophole-in-electronic-
communications-privacy-act-ecpa-allows-warrantless-search-of-emails-older-
than-6-months/)

------
dogma1138
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?

------
ocb
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
You can similarly configure your Google Account to sync apps and data to/from
your Android devices.

------
scintill76
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
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
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.

~~~
rodgerd
> 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
Guys this is %100 an advertisement.

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

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

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

------
robbrown451
What is pretty about it? It looks like an engineering prototype that hasn't
had designers touch it yet.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
That is the engineering prototype. See paragraph #2.

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

------
shenanigoat
Cool. My phone has Google Drive.

