Smartphone start-up Nextbit dropped plans to offer a CDMA version of its Robin smartphone, admitting it was “too optimistic, too bullish” in its plans.

Tom Moss, CEO of the company, said that while the company did not originally plan to offer such a device, during its Kickstarter campaign “we had many folks reach out to us…so we decided to take a look”. It said that “many of us have worked on devices that have shipped on US CDMA carriers previously, and had a rough understanding of the issues involved”.

“What people at the carriers, in good faith given our need for quick answers, thought would take ‘weeks’ has turned into ‘months’. What they thought would cost ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ has turned into ‘millions’. And we’re still not there,” Moss continued.

Nextbit is now fully refunding CDMA device buyers, and providing discount codes for the GSM version of the device.

The company, which has former Google and HTC staff among its management, smashed through its Kickstarter target last year. Its sales proposition is based around the integration of Android with cloud services, promising to make device storage capacity issues a thing of the past.