Microsoft's Turn in the Clouds

It's clear now that the real reason Microsoft acquired Danger was for their hugely cloud centric platform and IP manifested in the Hiptops. While the rest of the KIN platform felt relatively premature, its reliance on online services for not only bringing media down from the cloud, but also pushing it back up, was the device's almost perfectly executed redeeming feature.

To start, the KIN are tightly integrated into Windows Live. At setup, users were prompted to create or login with a Windows Live account. This Live account is then what tied phone to the KIN studio, the web interface through which one could manage nearly all data on the phone. Moving along through that initial setup wizard, users were prompted to login with Faceboook, Myspace, and Twitter accounts. The KIN called these social networks 'feeds' and immediately  pulled down data from them while setup completed. Data from these feeds populates tiles on the homescreen and contacts. Microsoft calls all this social data that gets aggregated together the KIN Loop - a mashup of status updates, news, and tweets from those feeds.

Up at the top is your name, Twitter avatar (which seems to take precedence over your Facebook avatar) and your latest Twitter or Facebook status. Tap on that, and you can push out an update to all the social networks you're connected to, or ones you choose. This is text only - no photos, videos, or anything else. In fact, this is really the primary way to publishing data to social networks from the KIN. Other media gets pushed out through the KIN spot, more on that later.

Avatars from Facebook come in and populate the loop, however avatars from Twitter inexplicably don't. The result is that you're occasionally left with a home screen full of grey shadow placeholders when your Twitter following out-updates your suspiciously silent, likely hungover Facebook friends. I don't have a MySpace account, though I'd hope that feed would bring in avatars lest Microsoft let the loop look even more sparse.


When Twitter dominates, all you get are grey shadow avatars. It's ominous and garrish.

The KINs signed you up by default to a number of Microsoft feeds which were occasionally funny and sometimes surprisingly useful. The feeds themselves are RSS. You could add other RSS feeds and make them appear in the Loop, though there's a good chance you'd still want to read things manually in the Feed Reader application.


Feeds - this is where you go to read things manually

There's a major 'but' coming here though. The loop concept itself was the ultimate in glanceable information. It was always there, and always updating without any user interaction. It's what you see when you unlock the phone, and it's front and center to the platform. If you've got a good data connection, it would stay fresh as you used the device. But the ultimate problem with the loop was that there was no ability to change the feed update frequency - it's a fixed 15 minutes. You can manually refresh the feeds from within the 'Feed Reader' application in the apps screen, but who wants to do that? In addition, I encountered numerous timeouts trying to update my Twitter feed manually, eventually giving up and letting it update itself on that 15 minute schedule. The end result is that I found myself often staring at stale data and getting tired of it quickly.

Microsoft's rationale is likely that higher frequency updates would kill battery life or go over API rate limits for the social networks - they've got a decent argument, but 15 minutes is about 15 minutes too long for "generation upload." Pulling down text and tiny avatars isn't that much data at all either - so there's no rationale to the argument that this is done to make the KINs sip data. Especially considering the rest of the cloud integration I'm getting to.

Shocking battery life Microsoft's Cloud - KIN Studio
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  • mcnabney - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link

    Important tools buried within menus.

    Dependence on a specific computer to sync.

    Too damn many things to do just to make a call.

    Navigation required a stylus due to tiny menus and icons.

    Too many lockups, reboots, battery yanks, and software incompatibilities.

    Most devices were EXTREMEMLY unreliable.

    Non-existent followed by limited push email support.

    I could go on and on....
  • aebiv - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link

    So make a shortcut where you want it.

    I haven't synced to a computer in years.

    I push one button and dial a number to make a call, or I tell it to make a call.

    I'd rather be able to use a stylus, than have a capacitive screen that won't allow for precise input.

    I can give you lists of people who have very few lockups, and I've seen quite a few Android and Apple phones lockup as well.

    My original Motorola Q is still running strong, so are many others.

    Activesync/Exchange support has always been best on the windows mobile devices, the VZ Droid STILL can't get push mail fixed. You have to buy a third party app called Touchdown to get it to work semi decently.

    Please, do go on.
  • kmmatney - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link

    If the average person plays with a windows mobile phone and an iPhone at the AT&T store, then they will buy the iPhone - it's that simple.
  • aebiv - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link

    Exactly. The average person bought the Motorola RAZR too.

    This current trend for marketing a "smartphone" for the masses is leading to a loss of features and flexibility for those of us who truly want a "Pocket PC."
  • nangryo - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link

    That makes you above average person and under average person I believe.

    I think you just thin that you are the first right?

    What a sad fellow
  • aebiv - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link

    You don't even make sense here.
  • nangryo - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link

    Living on your dream world eh? Where you assume that everyone is just like you

    Go then, use your beloved stylus. just don't use it for.... anything else

    lol
  • aebiv - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link

    No, I never said everyone was like me.

    Do you see me ripping on the iPhone for being a horrible design because it doesn't do what I want? No, I don't. All I am doing is pointing out that there are some of us, who don't want to have a locked down, limited, glorified feature phone that has 3 big buttons on the screen because it is supposed to be "thumb friendly."

    You ever try to use RDP on a 3" screen? It is hard enough on a 4.3" screen without a stylus.
  • mrdeez - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link

    Its because the Android OS doesn't have any way of completely closing apps once their open. Get Advanced Task Killer and use it every time you sleep your phone. I have seen my battery life go from 4-5 hours to 7-8.
  • aebiv - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link

    No, even using that in keeping the tasks closed. If you disable sense on the WinMo and go with SPB or use Titanium the battery life difference is even more drastic.

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