2011 – 2019murdered
Android Beam
“It beamed your life phone-to-phone with a tap, and died as quietly as it faded.”
“It kept its head in the clouds, and that was the whole point.”
The Nextbit Robin was an Android smartphone from a San Francisco startup founded by ex-Google Android team members Tom Moss and Mike Chan. Pitched as cloud-first, it stored data you weren't using in the cloud to save local space. People clearly liked the idea: it hit its $500,000 Kickstarter goal twelve hours after launching and cleared $1 million within two weeks.
The phone shipped to backers in February 2016, and by January 2017 Nextbit was bought by Razer, which halted sales almost immediately. The cloud storage feature was finally shut down in March 2018, leaving late Robins a little lighter in the head. But for a while, this odd little experiment in trusting the cloud made a lot of sense.
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“It beamed your life phone-to-phone with a tap, and died as quietly as it faded.”
“It slid open, it ran Android, it kept your secrets. Rest easy, keyboard.”
“Finnish for door — and for a while, it really was one.”