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Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 468
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I admit, I had a weird reaction to the Kin. Sort of the opposite to how I felt about the iPad. With the iPad, here was a slate device, small, thin, and (relatively) light, with apps built for that form factor. The Tablet PC enthusiast in me should have been thrilled. But instead my reaction was "meh". I just can't seem to get excited about it, although I am hopeful that it will spur innovation in the slate Tablet PC area from HP and others.
With the Kin, I knew right away that this was not the device for me. But, I love the idea! I'm a smartphone guy and have been since they were still just PDAs and so feature phones don't normally excite me much, but the Kin has and it is *almost* good enough that I would want one for myself.
I understand that I'm not the target market for the Kin; heck, my kids are much closer to that. But I do spend entirely too much time on social networking, I text a ton, and I take a lot of photos and video on my phone and share them with my friends, usually on Facebook. So despite my advanced years, I'm not too far off.
That said, there are some limitations that are a killer for me. The lack of a calendar is one. I guess Microsoft's research told them that kids don't want or need calendars, but as a responsible adult, I sure do. I'm actually surprised that the kids wouldn't want one. Do they not make plans with their friends? The memories are hazy now, back in the mists of time, but I seem to recall that I and my friends occasionally planned ahead our activities.
I also like having GPS, which the Kin lacks, however I know it can geo-locate photos, so I assume it's got some sort of GPS ability (maybe just the cell tower triangulation version), so perhaps all it needs is an app, something Microsoft could add if they felt it necessary.
I know several people have lamented the lack of IM, but I thought the kids these days were mostly using SMS instead. I know my IM use, outside of work, has dwindled to nearly nothing, but I text people all day long, and treat it much like IM. I'm guessing the Kin is safe here with the SMS functionality.
Games don't mean a whole lot to me, but I'm surprised there weren't any included at all. Seems like a glaring omission to me. I don't think they need arcade-like graphics-heavy shoot-em-ups, but some simple, quickly played games (think: solitaire) would have been nice.
I hear it's built on WP7 and I guess you can see some of that in the UI. The Loop reminds me of the active tiles on the WP7 home screen, but the Spot is something new. I would love to see the Spot appear in some form or another on WP7. Microsoft has said they will work to converge Kin and WP7 over time and I believe them. I think what happened was that the Kin was in development well before they decided to ditch Windows Mobile and start over with a fresh Windows Phone environment.
The Kin Studio is also pretty slick; far better than the My Phone thing they have on Windows Mobile. Let's hope it gets included in some way into WP7, too. Actually, I'd prefer that the WP7 version be integrated with Sky Drive and Windows Mesh (both of which should also be integrated with each other), but that may just be wishful thinking on my part. Microsoft really needs to think about a consolidated cloud strategy and resolve the competition between Mesh, Sky Drive, Live Sync, etc., just like they need to resolve Windows Media Player and the Zune software. But I digress...
Of the Kin phones, I'm definitely more attracted to the Kin One and its little square shape. I love my phones small and easily portable and for years used my old Sprint Touch (aka HTC Vogue) which had one of the best form factors I've seen yet. Currently, I'm using a Palm Pre (yes, my dirty little secret is I'm not using Windows Mobile any more), but will look very closely at the first WP7 devices. I really like the vertical slide-out keyboard on the Pre and the Kin One and hope we see a similar WP7 form factor. The Kin Two just looks a little too generic for my tastes. It's a shame the Kin One doesn't share the better memory and camera.
As a Sprint customer (still), I hope they eventually do the Kin on Sprint as well as Verizon. Should't be hard since both are CDMA. Maybe by then my kids will be old enough to want their own phones (they're not quite there yet, but will be very, very soon) and I'll steer them towards the Kin probably. And when they're not looking, I'll grab the Kin and play with it myself.
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