Verizon to Microsoft: Here Are Your Kins

July 19, 2010 1:43 PM





If anyone's still in the market for a Kin phone, you're officially out of luck: Verizon Wireless will no longer carry the devices, 19 days after Microsoft decided to pull the plug due to anemic sales. Dustbin of history (or at least dead tech), here they come."Verizon Wireless will no longer sell the Kin One or Kin Two in our company-owned stores," Verizon spokesperson Brenda Raney told the blog Phone Scoop on July 19. "Existing customers should not be impacted. There are no current plans to change any of the services associated with either the phone or the customers' services."Right before the end, Verizon had slashed the price of the stubby Kin One from $49.99 to $29.99 with a two-year plan; the more rectangular Kin Two was also given a price-tag haircut, from $99.99 to $49.99. But the carrier did nothing to lower the price of the devices' calling/data plan, which many pundits found excessive.The Kin devices had one cool feature, and that was their ability to seamlessly port users' photos and other content to a cloud repository--I'm testing a number of upcoming smartphones right now, for a set of reviews, and I sorely wish (with some of them) that it was easier to lift photos and video from the device and into the digital stratosphere. But everything else about Kin was pretty much half-baked, from the social-network updates to the conspicuous absence of games and third-party applications.Given the phones' narrow target demographic (teenagers and young adults), and lack of true smartphone functionality, I'm not sure there are many lessons that Microsoft can draw from this fiasco, except maybe don't try it again.

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