Microsoft looks to KIN for support A leaked Verizon product list shows Microsoft's Kin isn't dead, it's just been sleeping a while and will return as a cheapy feature-phone later this year – only without the good bits. That means none of the cloud services that were supposed to justify the huge monthly contract Kin users were expected to pay (put at $70 a month …
if it was on a GSM network I'd be tempted to pick up a few of the little square KIN phones. Why? At the weekend I don't really want to lug around an expensive 4-5" glass fronted mini tablet.. I want something small and compact I can use to make calls, check my calendar and txt/email/tweet from. Oh. I forgot. The Kin doesn't have a calendar. Maybe if they tweak the software a little and decouple if from the insane data plans they wanted people to pay for it might work
if there was a way to add parental controls - limited minutes, limited hours, limits on what they can do with data - this would actually be a good phone for my daughter but as very few Telcos want to make the effort to help me be a responsible parent the solution is a feature phone on a pre-paid account and they lose out (T-Mo here in the US has an attempt, but it's half hearted at best)
The $70/month for the KIN was Verizon's idea, because they didn't want to cannibalize any of their other devices.
Microsoft's failure was in trying to launch the KIN in the US, where the market is segmented in such a way that there isn't any effective competition between the phone companies, and once you decide to make a CDMA-only device, you effectively hand control of the device over to Verizon. If they had launched it in Europe it could have found it's effective niche.
It would be interesting to know how the iPhone would have worked out if Apple had signed an exclusivity deal with Verizon rather than AT&T
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