Kickstarter campaigns are not usually a good place to shop for your next phone. Hardware projects often end up massively delayed and the software becomes outdated before it even ships. However, Nextbit has updated its Kickstarter page with a new timeline for shipping the first finished Robin handsets—the first batch should go out on February 16th. Could it be a Kickstarter miracle?

The Nextbit Robin is billed as a "cloud-first" smartphone because it offloads your apps and data to a free 100GB cloud storage bucket when you're not using it. That data is then restored intelligently as you need it. It sounds neat, assuming it all works. The company is basically running up against Chinese New Year in a few weeks, during which all the factories in China shut down for a brief time. As soon as that's over Nextbit should be able to complete and ship the first units.

Early backers will get priority, so the first 1000 who joined the campaign will get their phones first. Then all other orders will be fulfilled. This is only for the GSM version, though. The CDMA model will be shipped later, but there's no firm date.

Source: Kickstarter