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107 pointsjonbaer68 comments

This is the most interesting part, to me:

> No barriers.

Robin comes with an unlocked SIM, so you can choose the right carrier for you. And because we think what you run should be up to you too, we’ve made it as easy as possible for you to customize Robin. Its unlocked bootloader and open source drivers make it easy to load CyanogenMod or any other ROM you want and Robin will still be under warranty.

I'm not up-to-date on my Android phones, but my impression is that this isn't particularly common. Most of the concerns I see on this thread are complaints about how secure it is to sync one's data on someone else's servers... but doesn't this make it much simpler to hack around with the phone and disable that functionality? (Or perhaps even set up syncing with one's own servers?)

Selling the phone with an unlocked bootloader seems to go against the "Security is critical to us, and we know it is to you too" mentality.

Having an unlocked bootloader opens to the device up to far more security vulnerabilities should it fall into the wrong hands. In some cases attacks can be performed even if the device has full disk encryption[1].

[1] https://www1.cs.fau.de/frost

They almost certainly meant unlockable instead of unlocked, just like Google's Nexus devices. This solves the security issue.

Unlocked phones aren't necessarily uncommon, if you're in the USA all "mobile wireless devices" can be unlocked in some manner[1]. It's nice that they give you an unlocked bootloader out of the box, but most popular Android bootloaders have been community unlocked in some manner. And I assume if you're willing to go to the effort of disabling their entire sync service you're kinda just left with a regular Android phone, and it'll probably be hard to replicate the entire stack nextbit has to sync on your own server.

[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/cell-phone-unlocking-fa...

even if the bootloaders are unlocked, you usually still face an issue with all those non-open drivers to make the phone work right.

One annoying example is how Sony's Xperia phones can have their bootloaders unlocked, but Sony keeps the secret sauce behind their image sensor's software locked up in a proprietary, inaccessible blob that (IIRC) other ROM makers have been unable to integrate into their Xperia builds.

If Nexbit is not only unlocking the bootloader but providing the hw drivers as open source, that could be a bigger deal.

I got as far as the Security section before I had to comment. They claim they care about data and user security by providing a fingerprint reader, which is known to be a poor method of authentication, as well as integrating with Google 2 Factor Authentication. They also tease about storing your, encrypted of course, on their servers. But what about in transit? What encryption cipher suite is used? How are the keys managed? Can I decrypt my data manually or do I have to use their product? Can I export my keys? Also if I cared about data security and privacy, which I do, the absolute last thing I would do is intentionally place all of my data on third party external servers that I didn't in some way have direct access to, behind a fingerprint reader or Google 2FA. I think for this to be "Next Now" they need to provide more information about something like this, especially since they claim to be concerned about it.

> I think for this to be "Next Now" they need to provide more information about something like this, especially since they claim to be concerned about it.

To be fair, Apple - the self-proclaimed mobile security champion - similarly claims to be concerned about security but does not[1] readily provide all that information (cipher suite, key management). The results after Googling "iPhone cipher suite" all point to non-apple domains.

Dry reading makes poor copy on any landing page, and most consumers will take the manufacturers word for it when they claim to be "secure".

1. https://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/

In short, it backs your files and apps to its servers, (like Google Photos, but not only photos), it is the only distinctive feature they have, and I do not think it makes it smarter than others, and honestly don't understand how it gets "smarter every day"

Just guessing: it could download/offload apps smartly by predicting what the user is bound to use at a given time of day (by tracking his usage patterns).

Is drive space that big of a deal?

No. For people on a capped data plan that is just a waste of data. Much better to buy a 32GB Micro SD for under £10. Of course that means you need a phone with a Micro SD slot but if space is an issue for you then I highly doubt you own a phone without a slot.

Yeah, and I am not sure if storage space is the biggest problem that needs to be solved. I rarely if ever heard of anyone complaining about it as much as their battery capacity or lack of updates.

"Robin has the cloud integrated right into Android OS" - Oh my gawd!

I instantly stopped caring once I read this poetic marketing spiel.

Wow... they really shrank the size of a data center!

Of course I know what this actually means: your phone is now an even dumber dumb terminal for accessing the cloud.

I personally gave up when I saw no references at all to encryption, security, or privacy. I assume this thing promiscuously mirrors everything unencrypted (at rest) to someone else's server, or if data is encrypted at rest it's done with someone else's key (server-side "encryption"). That's not only a privacy nightmare but also a security nightmare. What happens if I store a valuable credential, card number, etc. on my phone? Barrels of fun.

For example someone with access to this data could:

find /path-to-cache | grep id_rsa ...

... then see how many machines on the Internet they can ssh into using Android SSH client certificates. Blamo, instant botnet.

There's a "Intelligently secure" blurb at the bottom of the page, but it's incredibly unhelpful, since the most you'll get out of it is that it has TouchID and:

> It is securely transmitted and stored encrypted on our servers. And we provide two factor authentication with Google.

which could mean any number of things.

The founding team did an AMA on reddit that addresses a lot of the concerns people have in here.

I thought they did a good job of giving very "real" answers too, they didn't seem to dodge any topics.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3l726c/we_are_nextbit...

1. the cloud - No. I'm trying to get more off my data off the cloud, not on it.

2. (censored) swearing in marketing materials - Not classy. Or to put it the way nextbit's marketing would understand, F*ck no.

Where do they swear? I can't see it.

It's in their video just below the fold of their page.

I've never ran out of space on a smartphone, and I've never checked how much I'm using. So this phone isn't for me right? I can't see anything else it has going for it...

Do you use android? The base model iPhone only ships with 16GB, approx 5 of which is used up by the OS.

Well, what remains to be seen is their price point then.

I remember the Kickstarter special being around the ~$349 USD range when it was being funded. Chances are it will retail for more.

This site is making my quad-core 3.2GHz /desktop/ pc crawl. How?!

The clouds in the background are dynamically rendered. They're animating seven images of clouds using CSS transforms, and it doesn't look like they're using CSS animations to do it. If your computer is going into jet engine mode, chances are your browser isn't on speaking terms with your GPU and everything is being rendered on your CPU.

It is disgusting a webpage with that little content makes it that fucking unusable.

Come on people. Pretty designs are meaningless if you can't actually use them. How can I have faith in the claims you make about your phone if your website is this unusable? This exact form-over-function is why I hate the modern web.

More people need to see http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and understand.

haha Thank you for that link, it's now on my bookmarks!

PS: I logged in just to reply to your comment!

Rendering one line of text on each page fold is a difficult task. Think of all the strokes in a single letter!

I'm on a Macbook Air in Chrome and can barely scroll.

I also have a Macbook Air and it seems to work smoothly in Safari. I guess there are differences in how Safari and Chrome uses (or doesn't use) GPU acceleration on that page.

I have to use Safari for a bunch of stuff because Apple are willing to implement the DRM that lets the site use hardware acceleration (e.g. Netflix) to avoid my MBA sounding like a jet engine.

Do you have a good GPU?

My gpu is fine, but Firefox + Linux doesn't really like it too much :(

Still, no website but youtube in fullscreen has made my poor pc do these unspeakable things to its fan speeds

I like the design. I would have ordered it if it wasn't a cloud device.

They are solving a non-existent problem which introduces real problems. I don't want to sync data on my mobile data plan. I want to have it on my phone.

I agree, although they do give you a generous 32GB of data. I just wish it was standard for all phones to allow SD cards to be added up to 64GB at the least. My LG G2 doesn't even allow one, I've heard the newer models do at least.

On the security front, they need to clarify one large point: who has the keys to that encrypted data on the server?

It's great that they protect the data in transit and store it encrypted on their servers, but if the data is being encrypted by the server, and can be decrypted by the server, it's not really protected. Unfortunately, doing encryption at the server would allow them to make use of single instance storage and compression, which greatly reduces their data footprint and I'm guessing if the data was protected by the a client-owned key, they would have made mention of that along with their other security specifications since it is a big plus and would easily be a feature worth calling out.

Interesting looking phone. I suspect many will buy it purely because of its unique appearance and the fact that it ships with an unlockable bootloader. But the "cloud syncing killer feature" seems like an incredibly complicated solution to a problem that I've never had (and never known anyone who did). Seems like the very few users that do have chronic space issues could solve it with a $30 microSD card.

I'm curious what else they have in the works that would take advantage of the complicated stack they've built from OS-level customizations on up that might present a more compelling reason to chose this product.

The problem I see with relying on the cloud in mobile settings is that downloading and uploading stuff really eats at your battery quickly. Additionally at least in the US, cellular data plans aren't particularly cheap.

My biggest questions are -

1. is it a full backup like titanium backup or is it adb backup thats not as good.

2. Some apps you can't just uninstall and reinstall without reverifying every time. Google authenticator is an example, that I don't think you can backup at all with adb or theres apps like line, that send you a txt message every time you reinstall even with titanium backup. How would Robin handle that ?

I don't see why they couldn't work with Google Authenticator. The app doesn't necessarily need to be uninstalled. The files for the app just get offloaded to their servers temporarily.

Apparently this site works for other people, but it seems to be pointless to me. All I see is a phone with the date, temperature, tiny text that says "We've freed up 1.8GB by offloading 10 apps and 34 photos", and nothing to click on. Do you have to disable adblock or something?

Doesn't scrolling work for you?

Oh, I see it now. There was no scroll bar when I first loaded the site; not sure if I tried using scroll wheel or not.

I love the phone design and i was naturally optimidtic on first reading through the site, but the negative comments on here brought me round to the point that this isn't solving a serious problem. If you want some potential evidence of the challenge they seem to be facing, just look at the number of views their embedded YouTube video got: it's about 9,000 since posting in September. Hardly setting the world alight!

This would be far better as a minor benefit that Google built into Android directly. They did hint at remote virtualized apps a while back (in the context of "try before you buy") but nothing came of it.

For a second I thought it had an eink-like display and got really excited.

This should probably be taken as a huge hint to them (or other manufacturers). I'm surprised nobody has done a phone with an e-ink back (I know there are cases).

I'm not sure anybody cares about what Nextbit has created here. From the comments on HN, I'd suggest they haven't identified the market need.

I'm surprised nobody has done a phone with an e-ink back (I know there are cases).

See: YotaPhone, YotaPhone2[0]

[0]http://www.cnet.com/products/yotaphone-2/

$1100? How about a serious option?

This has bewildered me for years. I'd buy one.

This is a kickstarter scam. Just read the updates, typical "stringing 'em along". They have no prototypes and yet promise to ship by February?

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smart...

So the only device I own that absolutely has no guarantees about connectivity is the device you pitch the unending awesomeness of the cloud to me on?

Well OK, I guess.

I wish more phones followed the, somewhat uncommon, droid turbo battery model. The droid turbo 2 has a 3760 mAh battery. On slow days I can 2 to 3 days of internet browsing and reading hackernews without charging (with battery saver mode enabled).

I wish I could play around with some of my performance settings to squeeze even just a little bit more battery savings in.

I remember reading a comment the other day by someone that hacked their android phone to get something like a weeks battery life.

That would be a very interesting read.

I can't believe I was able to find this (I didn't upvote it at the time, apparently.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845068#up_10849346

edit: it was actually a tablet

I don't know (or care) much about the tech at play here, but I love the design of that hardware. Hot damn that's a sexy phone.

Why were Tizen, SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, and FirefoxOS such busts?

Android is really not great. It's just the best we have. It's weird to see projects like these, with a community-oriented and community-organized feel, that buy into Google's ecosystem so much.

The reason most of the ones you mentioned went bust is a lack of ecosystem. Few and poor apps means it's not compelling for users, which makes it unattractive for developers. I.e., if my mom can't play Words With Friends because I buy her an Ubuntu or Sailfish phone, she's not going to use it.

Firefox OS couldn't attract WhatsApp to build an app because of lack of a user base, which put off many of their European customers who _only_ use WhatsApp for messaging. WhatsApp isn't the only example. Even Facebook was essentially just a webview. Convincing companies to spend the resources to get onto your platform is actually really hard, and usually means developers shell out cash to companies like Facebook and WhatsApp to get them to build for their OS. You end up with this vicious feedback loop that kills the platform.

Android already has an ecosystem with top-of-the-line apps. If you want to build your own mobile operating system, building on Android gives you an immediate advantage because you already have developers building for your product, which means real people in the real world actually have a reason to use your phone.

Not only is the ecosystem better on Android, the fact that it came to market first is a huge positive too. No matter how much money you have, it takes a long time to build a proper OS.

I don't even really use any third party apps but Google Maps, Gmail, Chrome, and Google Voice/Hangouts keep me on Android. At the time (and maybe now?) WP8 didn't even have proper notifications and IE had issues rendering random websites which was annoying.

There certainly were many things Microsoft did better though, like their keyboard, copy paste, and the speed of the UI. It's too bad they seem to have given up on it.

Yep. Even mighty Microsoft, with no shortage of money, couldn't make Windows Phone work.

I feel the main reason android was so successful was google not only controls the software end, they also control a large part of the manufacturing end.

Google was able to say "Ok, we want to add support for X thing into our OS, so rather than leave it there doing nothing lets build a phone around that feature".

Buy Motorola was the smartest push google has done in years. It gave them patents, manpower, and the ability to bring ANY technology they wanted to an at least small scale high quality production run.

5.2" is way too big for my likeing. Otherwise it seems to be a nice phone.

I know a few people that are looking to upgrade from the one plus one, but have no options due to lack of NFC on other one plus models. This seems a great choice for them.

I happen to meet that Robin makers last month in Berlin. They are very enthusistic and cool guys. I liked that they share everything about there company and working style so openly.

Security and fingerprints does not go hand in hand.

It is a cool and convenient feature, it stops the causal girlfriend/boyfriend that tries to spy on their partner but not much more.

If you're actually running out of space: some Androids (including my Moto E) can use 64gb MicroSD cards.

I do hope that it doesn't ship with that godawful animation seen at the top.

Finally, we can detect our 'phases'.

YubiKey NFC support would be great.

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