By Erica Evans, San Francisco Chronicle
Former Google and HTC employees are teaming up to enter the smartphone market with Robin, a cloud-focused phone from their San Francisco startup Nextbit.
Nextbit CEO Tom Moss and CTO Mike Chan met in the early days of Android and struck out to form Nextbit in 2013, later hiring Scott Croyle of HTC as Nextbit’s Head of Design.
Mobile phone design, the trio decided, was in need of a shakeup.
"There’s nothing really new or interesting happening in terms of the hardware itself, how it looks, in terms of the industrial design of it, or in terms of the software too," said Moss.
So they created Robin, a boxy phone with an industrial feel, bright colors and prominent speakers. The interesting twist is inside, as the phone attempts to solve storage problems by automatically moving unused apps and photos to the cloud.
Nextbit will launch the phone through the crowdfunding site. The company says it wants to communicate directly with people in technology and will tweak the phone based on their feedback. The first 1,000 phones will sell for $249; after that, the price jumps to $299.
"That core Android community — the hackers, the developers — those are the initial target customers," Croyle explained.
Analyst Rob Enderle says it’s an interesting approach.
"It used to be the only way you got a phone was going into a cellphone store, and now you buy phones on the Internet," said Enderle, of the Enderle Group.
A small company like Nextbit is well suited for this kind of experiment because the market has not yet set its profit margins, Enderle said. Cupertino’s Apple is locked into the usual smartphone production and distribution model because it must maintain certain strict margins or risk a stock collapse.
"Companies like Nextbit are showing innovation can still trump market domination if it’s done properly," Enderle said.
The company also says Robin is one of the first smartphones to be designed in San Francisco instead of Silicon Valley.
"S.F. is such a great design town," Moss said, "just in terms of the arts and culture and the design culture of San Francisco. So we’re really excited to be doing that here."
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
