This Week in Phones #2 - The KIN Phones

Microsoft’s newest entries into the cell phone market are the KIN phones: Kin 1 and Kin 2. Today these phones became available on Verizon Wireless’s online store only, but will soon be available in their retail stores. When these phones were announced, many bloggers criticized the KIN, saying this phone would fail soon after it came out. In this article, I would like to share with you some of the specs of the KIN.

First off, Microsoft makes two KINs: One with a vertical sliding QWERTY keyboard and one with a vertical sliding keyboard. Both phones have a touchscreen and an impressive camera. The Kin 1 has a 2.6” inch touchscreen and the Kin 2 has a 3.4” inch touchscreen. The Kin 1 has a 5 megapixel camera and the Kin 2 has an 8 megapixel camera. Both phones have Wi-Fi and a custom Windows OS. On paper that sounds like a good phone, but the phone does have some short comings.

Both Kins have 8GB of unexpandable memory, which is unfortunate. The second short coming is the price. The phones are technically “smart phones” and are priced competitively. Microsoft claims these phones are smart phones, but are aimed at teens and early 20’s users. That means you need to have a data plan, which starts at $30 per month. So if you’re a teen buying this phone, convincing your parents to pay $30 per month for data might be kind of tough for some people.

In conclusion, this phone should really be marketed as a multimedia phone since they’re trying to go after young people. I am interested to see where this phone goes. I think it has an interesting design and feature set, so I’m really interested to see what owners do with their Kins and whether they’ll like it or not.

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