It came with a lot of fanfare less than two months ago and breathed its last yesterday with nary a sigh of regret to be heard. We are talking of the Kin, Microsoft’s attempt at a social networking phones targeted at the young and the hip, that officially was laid to rest yesterday. Looking at the episode in rosy retrospect, the Kin was always going to struggle to succeed, notwithstanding the hype around it. We could go on and on about how its price was initially too high or that it lacked the “cool” factor, but we really think that the device was let down in the app department. In particular, there were seven stumbling blocks that tripped up the Kin very badly:
- No instant messenger: A social networking phone without an instant messaging client? Well, the Kin did not have one – a shocking error when even mid-segment feature phones had an IM.
- No apps: At a time when the cellphone world is fairly going app crazy, there was no provision to add apps or games to the Kin. You were literally stuck with what you had. Archaic!
- No calendar: A phone targeted at the youth segment with no calendar app on it. Yeah, right.
- No photo editing or uploading to Twitter: Both Kin devices came with decent (if not great) cameras, but for some reason there was no image editing option available. For some even stranger reason, you could not upload pictures or videos directly to Twitter, one of the most popular social networking services around. Weird!
- Poor browser: Browsers on mobile devices have never been Microsoft’s strength and the Kin’s browser was adequate at best, especially if you did not compare it with the likes of Mobile Chrome and Safari. And as you could not download Opera Mini or Skyfire to the Kin, the user was pretty much stuck with a browser that was nothing special. Oh, and there was no support for Flash either!
- Location-based apps: In the era of Foursquare and Google Latitude and geo-tagged tweets, both the Kin devices had GPS that was limited to geotagging images. Not good enough, we think.
- Not always on: All right, you can say that this has not directly to do with apps, but we are including it because it affected the performance of the apps that were on the Kin. Notwithstanding the claims at the press conference about the device letting you “share your life moment to moment,” the stark fact was that the Kin refreshed every fifteen minutes. That would have been acceptable a few years ago, but not in the age of instant push. Yes, the fifteen-minute routine saved battery, but then today’s youth have got used to devices with less than perfect battery life (remember that phone from Cupertino?).
