Microsoft's KIN: A Eulogy
by Brian Klug on July 13, 2010 3:42 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- KIN
- Mobile
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.
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squngy - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
I've seen the like of circular packaging before :)In slovenia one mobile carrier used to sell all of its subsidized phones in tin tubes like those.
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(link)
http://shrani.si/f/f/wD/3ZJg7tbT/itakxl.jpg
Orbs - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
The comment, "In addition, there's no settings panel for the entire browser to clear cache, cookies, or history" is incorrect.From the home screen, swipe left to the apps pane, scroll down and tap "Settings". In "Settings" swipe right to the app-specific settings and select "Browser". In the Browser Settings, you can clear data cache, cookies and history. You can also turn cookies on/off, JavaScript on/off and browse in desktop mode if you have a need for that.
Smilin - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
Bought one mostly for the sake of getting rid of my horrible Win 6x phone. The plan is to give it to the wife in the fall when WP7 ships. She's become familiar with it and is really looking forward to getting it.The phone actually rocks. It's easy to use, does the few things that it does very well, is easy (I said that), the "cloud" offering is something that bigger competitors could learn from.
The Kin turned into a big joke I guess but I just can't get myself to join that bandwagon. I'm sorry but **I LIKE IT**.
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