Nextbit’s Robin Is Another Pretty Phone–But with Infinite Storage | Hacker News Reader

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

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47 pointsslewis38 comments

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

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.

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.)

I live in a large city and I still don't always have wifi. I have wifi at my home, obviously, but not on my daily commute, not at most grocery stores, not when I'm out hiking in a park. During those times something like this would just be sucking up my limited lte bandwidth. Heck I'm sure most people still experience losing their cell signal when in the guts of a large building. If I really need more space an SD card seems like a much better option.

I may be in the minority here, but even if it was ubiquitous I wouldn't want "every corner of the operating system" running through public WiFi.

The creators must be aware of these concerns. I'd be interested in hearing their thoughts on the issue.

I kinda really hate how City wifi is being done. Every time you connect to the network you have to go through the damn login process on a web page because obviously TWC can't have any of those nasty Verizon customers logging on. I don't even bother with it anymore because all it does is block whatever it was I was looking at as soon as I step out of my house.

It doesn't have to be ubiquitous. The only times you're going to run out of space is when you're downloading something, and chances are good that you'll run out when you're downloading something large. So you'll already be in a position to download a large file when this kicks in.

Another use case for running out of space: recording video. Which is quite likely to be when you're out and about someplace with no WiFi, like a park, for example.

Physical limits can be worked around with tricks though. For example google had a feature where they prefetched and started loading a result as soon as you start moving your mouse towards it to click. Latency is still there but hidden from the user.

Pretty excited to see what innovative tricks with predictive prefetching they came up with to base a whole company on it. I can also see this being useful for simply just files instead of apps. For example Dropbox on mobile also has a "thin client" approach but doesn't do anything smart to cache frequently accessed files unless you explicitly favorite them.

> For example google had a feature where they prefetched and started loading a result as soon as you start moving your mouse towards it to click.

This isn't a trick, it's moving the information nearer to your user. This comes with a maintenance cost (though cache patterns make this much easier).

Most of all: the only real reason to force me to store my stuff in your cloud is so you can fossick through my stuff to make more money out of me.

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.

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.

I agree that most users don't utilize all of the space provided by any online service, although in this case what they upload is also out of their control. Typically space utilization is somewhat hampered because users won't be bothered to wring every last bit out of it by hand.

Even if we say each user only stores 10GB over 3 years, that's $10 just in S3 storage costs. Bandwidth costs for S3 can easily eclipse that if data is transferring back out to the device frequently. Even at a super conservative 10GB outbound per year, that's another $1.50.

I'm skeptical that a $400 phone sold in small quantities has the kind of margin to support this type of ongoing cost over the long term. They're smart people though, so maybe they have factored all of this in.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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).

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

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."

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Guys this is %100 an advertisement.

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

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

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

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

That is the engineering prototype. See paragraph #2.

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

Cool. My phone has Google Drive.

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