Robin smartphone fans on Sprint or Verizon are in for some bad news, as Nextbit needs more time to deliver the CDMA version.
The Robin smartphone raised great interest ever since its initial debut on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, shaping up as a powerful cloud-based handset. The project raised its funding goal on the first day on the platform, and went on to raise even more throughout the rest of its campaign. Within a week, the Robin smartphone already had $850,000 in funding, and the Kickstarter campaign eventually closed with a whopping $1.3 million pledged by 3,611 backers.
The Robin smartphone only supported AT&T and T-Mobile at first, but Nextbit later added Verizon and Sprint to the mix. In other words, the cloud-first Robin smartphone will hit all four major carriers in the United States, but not just yet.
As opposed to AT&T and T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon are CDMA carriers. Nextbit originally targeted a February release for the CDMA variant of its Robin smartphone, but the company just announced a delay. Nextbit now believes that April is a more realistic time frame for launching the CDMA version of Robin, so Sprint and Verizon customers will have to wait a while longer.
The company points out that it didn't even plan a CDMA version at first, but promised one at users' request. Nextbit notes that it got "carried away" with all the hype of the campaign, but it will not be able to deliver the CDMA version of its Robin smartphone as soon as it hoped.
"When we estimated we would deliver CDMA Robin in February, we were being optimistic," Nextbit explains in an update on its Kickstarter project page. "Now that we've gone through development and are working out the testing schedule, we think April is more realistic."
Nextbit doesn't have a specific release date just yet, so the April time frame is all we have so far for the CDMA Robin release. The company will offer more detailed information as it gets closer to the actual launch.
"We know this isn't the type of news you want to hear and we're sorry. We'd love to tell you all the Robins would ship in February like we planned, or at least give you an exact date. Stay true, Rebels. We are gonna do this," Nextbit adds.
As a reminder, the Robin smartphone features a 5.2-inch display with a full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels at 424 ppi and packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor with 3 GB of RAM under the hood.
The handset further sports a 13-megapixel main camera, a 5-megapixel selfie cam, 32 GB of internal storage, and a fingerprint reader. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC.
The highlight of this smartphone, however, is that users can store most of their data in the cloud rather than filling up the internal storage space. The cloud solution could be the end of smartphone storage woes, and that's what made the Robin smartphone so attractive.
It remains to be seen when the CDMA version will finally be ready to ship, but we'll keep you up to date as soon as we learn more.
