The Great Experience I Had With Nextbit

I had bought the Nextbit Robin last year on Black Friday. Since it was Black Friday, the phone had got a price cut of $100 and was being sold at $135. The Nextbit Robin had a great set of specifications - Snapdragon 808, 13/5MP camera, 3GB RAM, 100GB cloud storage, a close to stock version of Marshmallow (with a promised update to Nougat, now available) and a fingerprint sensor. As I was looking to upgrade my two-year old Android One smartphone, the Nextbit Robin at $135 was a deal I couldn't afford to miss. Moreover, Nextbit did sell the Robin here in India too via Flipkart at Rs.19,999 (approximately $311.17), which is more than twice of $135. Additionally, there was no phone at around $135 which could compete with Robin. I had to buy it, there was no other option.

I had the Robin shipped to one of my relatives residing in the United States. I got my hands on the Robin about a month after my family relative came to India for the Christmas holidays. I gladly unpacked Robin as soon as I received it and started testing it out. As I was testing Robin's camera, I found that the back camera was faulty. The rear camera wasn't able to focus properly on both nearby and distant objects. I tried factory resetting my phone multiple times to no avail, the lack of focus in the back camera was thus a hardware defect. Nextbit didn't have any service centres in India. Even if they did have service centres in India, I doubt whether they would have authorised the warranty of a Robin that had been bought overseas. I didn't wish to put my relative under any sort of burden to get my Robin fixed in the United States and then ship it back to me. Irrespective of whether I liked it or not, it was likely that I would have to ask my relative for further help. With a slight glimmer of hope, I raised a support ticket with Nextbit regarding the problem in my Robin. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from Nextbit. I thought that they will ask me to get the Robin fixed in a United States' service centre, after all that's where Robin had been purchased from. The Nextbit support staff was just fantastic and after initial rounds of troubleshooting didn't help in fixing my issue, I was asked to ship Robin to San Francisco. All the expenses for the courier were to borne by Nextbit. Nextbit assured me that if the problem I had described was accurate, they would replace my Robin. Later on Nextbit confirmed the hardware defect and shipped me another Robin soon after. 

Along with the Robin, Nextbit also bundled in a back cover and a pair of screen protectors. I couldn't be happier!

Well, this experience was really overwhelming for me. I haven't come across any company except Amazon who have gone to such a great extent to honour customer satisfaction. If you reside somewhere other than India, the experience I had with Nextbit might not appeal to you that much. I'm well aware of phone replacements happening every other day in countries such as the United States. But the customer service scenario is completely different here in India, in fact I would say it's not in a good shape. Prior to the Nextbit Robin, I owned a Micromax Canvas A1 (Android One). On one of those bad days, I dropped my A1 and as a result it's screen broke. I took my A1 to a nearby Micromax service centre and the support staff there told me that it will take about a week to replace the screen. Looking back now, I still wonder how that one week turned into two months. The Micromax support staff kept on pospoing the delivery of my phone and gave the lack of spare parts as the reason for the delay in repair of my phone. It's not just me who is reiterating the lack of quality customer service, I have also had many of friends share similar experiences as the one I had with Micromax. As an Indian consumer, I'm not used to companies going all out to ensure customer satisfaction. The experience I had with Nextbit was my first wherein a company showed that it actually took great value in looking after customer satisfaction. 

More recently we saw Wileyfox promising to upgrade all it's devices to Android Nougat. All the Wileyfox handsets are powered by CyanogenOS out of the box and after Cyanogen called off all it's services last year, it was evident that there would be no future updates for Wileyfox devices from Cyanogen's end. Wileyfox promised it's users that it will a "maintain a no bullshit attitude to the Wileyfox user experience." Wileyfox didn't have any experience in software development, but after Cyanogen's abrupt end, Wileyfox decided to bring up their own software division. 

So, as a consumer, I'm glad to report that things are changing. Over the next few years, I hope that OEMs will start paying heed to consumers and change themselves so that they can serve their customers better.

Krittin Kalra

Krittin Kalra is a 20 year old Android freak. Striving for passions, chasing down his dreams and living a life without regrets is his sole mantra. A bit moody, he also does custom ROM reviews for AndroGuider. Currently pursuing his B.Tech, he aspires to follow his heart.