Nextbit's new Robin smartphone flies to the cloud (pictures)

Nextbit, a company founded by ex-HTC and Google executives, has announced the Robin, its first smartphone. It's an Android device, but with a baked-in cloud storage concept that Nextbit thinks is unique.

The Robin is being Kickstarted and, at the time of writing, had $775,000 (from a $500,000 target) with 27 days to go.

There are two colour schemes for the Robin. The midnight colour is pictured above, and a brighter aqua-and-white look will also be available.

As if to counteract the squared-off design, Nextbit has added circular flourishes to the Robin around the buttons.

Turn the Robin over and you'll see an insignia of a cloud, which is hemmed in by a short strip of tiny LED lights. These light up when the phone is either uploading or downloading.

Because of the pre-production status of the Robin, the software was being demoed on the Nexus 5 rather than the handset itself.

When you run out of storage or if you haven't looked at a photo or used an app for a while, Robin automatically removes the asset ("offloads") from the phone to free up space.

When you want it back,  just tap on the greyed-out image and wait a few moments for it to download again and let you open it up.

Overall, the software design on the Robin aims for a clean and crisp look.

By the estimated launch date of January 2016, the Robin should come with the latest version of Android, 6.0 Marshmallow.

The Robin has a 5.2-inch display with 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. The front facing camera will be 5-megapixel.

That rear snapper will be a pretty standard 13 megapixels and the Robin will have a 2,680mAh battery with quick-charge capabilities.

The Robin will be USB 3.0 compatible and also have the usual run of NFC, Bluetooth 30 LE and, in addition to GSM and WCDMA, it'll work across an array of LTE Bands: 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/17/20/28

The circular design touches extend to the volume button, while the fingerprint scanner is built in to the side power button (like the new Xperia Z5) as opposed to the front-facing home button.

Inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor with 3GB of RAM.

As we said before the proposed delivery is January next year and right now you can get a Robin on the Kickstarter campaign for $349. Read all our first impressions here.