Nextbit gears up to launch its own Android phone

Nextbit, the startup that brought a host of continuity features to Android, is now gearing up to launch its own smartphone. While the San Francisco-based company has not revealed much about its debut in the hardware business, it has announced that its Android device will be quite unique.

“We want to set this off as something different,” Croyle said. “We don’t have to be for everybody,” Scott Croyle, Nextbit’s Chief Product Officer, was quoted as saying.

In fact, we expect nothing less than a revolutionary design from Nextbit as Croyle happens to be former HTC design chief. Speaking of formers, Nextbit’s co-founders Tom Moss and Mike Chan used to work for Google.

The phone that Nextbit is planning to sell in the coming weeks will make a good use of its cloud-based continuity app known as Baton. The service lets you pass the application data from one Android device to another without any hassle. For instance, if you are playing a game on a phone whose battery is about to die, you can pick up the game from the same level on your other Android device, provided both of them have Baton and the game installed.

There is only one glitch- Baton cannot be downloaded from the Play Store; it must come preloaded with the device. Perhaps that’s the reason why the company is launching its own phone.

“We’re really shifting the focus to a controlled experience,” CEO Tom Moss said. “We don’t want to do piecemeal services anymore.”

The 20-employee company has raised $18 million from Accel Partners and Google Ventures, but it won’t be a cakewalk to survive in an overly-saturated market that sees rise and fall of mobile brands on a daily basis.

Source: Recode

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