Both companies are known for head-turning hardware. It’s unclear if the deal will produce a Razer-branded phone.
Razer, known for its powerful gaming laptops and outlandish prototypes, has acquired smartphone startup Nextbit, the two companies announced on Monday.
Nextbit, whose Android-powered Robin smartphone turned heads last year for its unique styling and built-in cloud storage options, has mostly funded itself though Kickstarter campaigns. The company plans to stop selling the Robin, Recode reports, and operate as an independent business unit within Razer, which will mean no immediate changes for current owners.
“To put it simply, we’ll be doing exactly what we’ve been doing all along, only bigger and better,” Nextbit CEO Tom Moss said in a statement. Warranty claims on the Robin will be honored for at least six months, and software updates and security patches will continue to flow through February 2018, Moss said.
Those updates and patches are critical to the Robin’s usability, perhaps more so than competing Android phones, since one of the Robin’s standout features is the ability to store apps and photos in the cloud when the phone’s on-board storage is used up. The Robin’s $399 retail price included up to 100GB of cloud storage.
While updates appear to be a certainty for the next year, it’s less clear what will happen to Nextbit’s plans beyond the current Robin, which is GSM-only and therefore limited to AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. The company had to abandon a CDMA version for Sprint and Verizon, refunding preorders and people who backed it on Kickstarter.
It’s also unclear what Razer’s long-term plans are following the acquisition. Will it use Nextbit’s talent (many of the the Robin’s designers are HTC and Google alums) to one day make a smartphone of its own? A Nextbit spokesperson declined to comment on that point. In a statement, Razer Co-Founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan said only that “With the talent that Nextbit brings to Razer, we look forward to unleashing more disruption and growing our business in new areas.”
Buying a startup with a buzzworthy product is not out of character for Razer. In 2015, the company acquired Ouya, makers of Android-based game software and consoles for TVs. Ouya ultimatley abandoned its console to focus on its software assets, including a content catalog and online retail platform.