Making Android phones is hard. You have a whole world full of competitors, some with billions of dollars to throw around on software hardware development, marketing, exclusive partnerships or content deals. You have to do something to make your phone st out, while at the same time satisfying the sky-high dems of a vocal community of enthusiasts who will roast you alive for the slightest perceived infraction.

And don’t even think about developing your own mobile OS, whether it’s based on Android or not. If Amazon, Microsoft, BlackBerry can’t hack it in the phone market, what hope does your startup have?

Color me curious, then, to learn about what Nextbit plans to do to get its foot in the door. The company, which is led by veterans from HTC , is nearly ready to launch its debut phone, Robin. Robin will go on sale in nuary, but Nexbit has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to gauge interest scale its initial manufacturing run.

at is Robin?

Robin is an upper-mid-tier Android phone. It’s got the specs you’d expect from a phone that will sell for around $400 unlocked. There’s a Snapdragon 808 processor, 5.2-inch 1080p display, 32GB of storage, 3GB of RAM, NFC. According to the list of supported bs, it should work well with all four U.S. carriers. In a nod to the tinkerers in the Android community, it ships with an unlocked bootloader, Nextbit will support the phone even if you mess around with rooting other enthusiast activities that typically void your warranty with other phones.

Nextbit

It has a 2680mAh battery, which is a bit on the low side, but with a 1080p display Snapdragon 808, together with really lean software, the phone could still have decent battery life.

It’s got a B-C connector like the Oneus 2, but unlike that small-startup direct-market phone, this one supports quick charging B 3.0 speeds.

It’s got a couple of neat features, like stereo speakers with dual amplifiers a fingerprint reader in the power button on the side, but there’s nothing on the spec sheet that would excite Android superfans. It’s all fine—it’s what you’d expect for the price—but the core specs are not what I would call ambitious.

But Robin isn’t just a phone. For starters, it doesn’t look like all the other Android phones, which either follow the curved-back approach of the original HTC One, or look exactly like the latest ione. Robin is, for lack of a better term, highly designer-y. It’s a simple rectangular slab without the rounded corners that have become de rigueur on smartphones. The ratios symmetry button placement…it all has a very carefully considered look. For better or worse, it looks feels like a phone for which the designers didn’t have to compromise with the engineers or marketing department.

Nextbit

It comes in two colors: midnight mint. Mint is…interesting. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that shade of blue on a personal electronic device before. I don’t think it will be all that popular, but it’s definitely not one of the same old colors we always see.

I’m not sure why Nextbit named its first phone after a bird. It is my sincere hope that its second phone is named Batman. 

It’s all about the cloud

Robin, of course, comes with Nextbit’s own spin on the Android OS. It looks acts like stock Android—which I prefer—except in one important way. Nextbit has built cloud storage into the core of the operating system.

As soon as you set up your phone, it starts backing up apps data to the free 100GB of cloud storage Nextbit provides to each user. en you finally fill up the phone’s 32GB of storage, it automatically starts “offloading” (read: deleting) stuff that it has backed up to the cloud. It’s not nearly as scary as it sounds.

Nextbit’s OS uses an intelligent algorithm to offload items that you are not likely to use. If you haven’t fired up Clash of Clans in 6 months, for example, it might be the first to go when your phone storage fills up. The game’s A is already backed up to the cloud (but none of your personal data for the app, like login info settings). So the A gets deleted, leaving behind a grey “ghost” icon. If you decide you want to play Clash of Clans again, you tap the icon it re-downloads the app, filling in the color on the app icon. Fire it up it’s as if you never deleted it—all your personal settings login info are still on your device, as they don’t take up much room.

Nextbit

otos videos are automatically backed up, too. Because those contain personal information, they’re encrypted on the phone with a phone-side encryption key before being sent to Nextbit’s servers. Nextbit couldn’t look at your photos videos if it wanted to (even if it gets a warrant for your data from the FBI). As you reach the limit of your local phone storage, high-res photos videos are dropped in favor of screen-resolution images, with the full-size version safe in the cloud.

But what if you want the big image back? at if you want to email the full-res photo you took of your cat being just so cute? ll, the file picker will have indications of what is stored on the cloud, you can choose to attach either the full-size image or the small screen-size image. The latter may be all you need for, say, an MMS message.

Nextbit

I’m told that if 100GB proves to be too be insufficient storage for many users, Nextbit will just bump up the limit. Nextbit doesn’t plan to make money selling online storage, but rather to use it as a differentiating factor to sell phones. And of course, there’s a little slide-out drawer on the home screen that lets you quickly see which apps are in the cloud, or to pin an app so that it never gets delet…er…”offloaded.”

And naturally, the software is smart enough not to eat through your limited mobile data or drain your battery. l that cloud uploading happens only when your phone is plugged in on -Fi by default (you can make it more aggressive if you wish).

The cloud is not enough

Of course, all the neat automatic cloud storage in the world isn’t going to make people want your phone if the camera stinks, or if it doesn’t perform well, or is buggy, or doesn’t get rapid OS updates.

Nextbit knows that Robin needs to meet certain “table stakes” when it comes to premium smartphones. The display needs to be really good, the battery life long, the sound quality excellent (with stereo speakers two amplifiers, it’ll likely do well there). rhaps most importantly, the camera has to be awesome. The latest from Samsung have seriously raised the bar on camera quality, “good enough” is not good enough anymore. Robin is launching in nuary, so it had damn well better be ready for a world in which the ione 6S is already in millions of pockets.

Robin uses a top-of-the-line 13-megapixel image sensor from Samsung with phase detect autofocus. It’s got the hardware, but Nextbit admits the software just isn’t ready yet. It takes months of hard work by hardcore imaging experts to tweak, tune, iterate. The company is aware that the camera has to easily take awesome photos in a wide variety of conditions, all with lightning-fast performance. But it will be a few months before the camera quality is good enough to show off.

ly, it’s too early to judge most of the intangibles about Robin. The company only has early EVT (engineering verification test) samples from its manufacturing partner, Foxconn. They’re barely functional, not up to the final stards of fit finish, not really indicative of the finished product. The software was demonstrated to me on a Nexus 5, because the Robin phones don’t work reliably yet. That’s completely normal for a product that is four months from shipping, however.

I do know this: the first batch of phones will ship with Android 5.1.1, which will be out of date by nuary—Nexus phones will get Android 6.0 this fall. Nextbit says they’re already working on their 6.0 software will update the first batch of phones very quickly after the nuary launch, while phones that ship after the first few production runs will have Marshmallow already on them.

ll customers bite?

The real question is: are Android fans going to want one? The cloud features of Robin are interesting, they solve a real problem—I’ve heard plenty of friends family members complain about their phones being out of space. But is it a saleable feature? Do people buy phones on “doesn’t run out of space?” I get the impression they do not, or else the world wouldn’t still gobble up 16GB iones for $700.

Certainly, building cloud features into the core of the operating system is an idea that has legs. There’s no end to the awesome stuff you can build on that concept. Imagine buying the next phone having everything just as it was before—the same screen layout, same apps, all your login info settings, everything. Imagine being able to log into your phone from a web browser anywhere in the world. These aren’t features Nextbit can offer now, but it’s the direction they want to head in.

At least for now, Robin will have to compete in the crowded “premium sub-$400” market for Android phones by leaning on stard features like battery life camera quality as much as its newfangled cloud features.