Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brenda Minnemann from pocketnow.com it's been about a year since Microsoft killed the kin and of course kin was the result of the danger acquisition danger is the company that made the side kick and we're going to talk about why kin failed we're gonna take a look back at the software and see what was interesting about it and what really caused the demise of the device so let's get to it now of course there were two different kins can one and kin - this is the kin - this is a higher end version that has the keyboard the higher resolution display and it came in really really interesting packaging one of the problems with the kin was that it was overpriced the data plan was as expensive as a smartphone so most people said why would I get sort of a toned-down smartphone when I can just get a full out smartphone and back a year ago there were some really great droids on Verizon this was a Verizon exclusive so here we go it's supposed to actually open up like so and there is the kin - it's already turned on so we're gonna talk about the device now the thing about kin is that Microsoft was trying to go after the very social networking friendly Krab the people that were constantly connected to Facebook the people that cared a lot about text messaging and Twitter and all of the social networks the problem is that at the same time smart phones could do the same thing plus a whole lot more they can add a lot of limitations it didn't have a third-party app story it was slow the hardware was limited so people just went for full-out smartphones okay so here's the unlock screen and this is all by the way based on Windows Phone 7 so of course we see a lot of similarities and here we are and we're going to zoom in on the device a little bit and let's go into the the portrait orientation now we've got a few components here and it's not working exactly right I think it's because they shut down the Kin service but we've got three home screen panels 1 2 3 we are in the center right now which is your social feed there should be pictures right now this is streaming in from Facebook and Twitter so the idea and this is called the loop by the way is that your loop would show you what's going on in the social networking world you can keep up to date if you swipe to the left you get your favorite people quick way to dial somebody this is a phone after all and if you swipe to the left this is where you go for applications to jump into the browser use your email client and so on and so forth we also have this really interesting icon along the bottom this is called the kins spot and this is kind of a paradigm that made it easy to share things so let's say you want to share your contact information so you bring this down here to the spot and you can put anything in there that you want to share and you can determine where you want it to be shared to and then you would hit upload and it would go to your desired social network so kind of a cool idea again people didn't really have the need to have such a feature on a phone if you want to share something in Android for example you hit the share button and everything is taken care of for you so again we have the social feet here which is quite nice now the kin two had a slide-out keyboard pretty good slide-out keyboard it looks a little bit funny but it was actually very usable now in terms of other hardware got a smallish screen we've kind of got a pebble with like a design a good camera on the back and a dedicated camera key kind of awkwardly placed towards the the Tilted part of the Kin I always thought this was funny look how many names there are back here for different names sharp one Windows Phone 2 verizon 3 and kin for so many different brands associated with the kid just kind of overwhelming if you never turned a but turned over the phone and took a look at the back so we're going to flip back to the front here and turn the device back on let's check out the web browser and see how it was again this is based on Windows Phone 7 software kind of an earlier version so we'll jump into the browser no flash supporter in anything like that you can jump into landscape orientation and we can pull down from the top here to get our tabs you can slide these tabs into the spot to share our website you can flick back up to get this stuff to go away so let's go to the desktop version of pocket now and see what the browsers like had a slow processor a single core processor in the Kin which and that with not much RAM it wasn't intended to be really a powerful device and here we're loading here you can see we're on Wi-Fi and over Verizon so here comes the desktop version of pocket now voting on the Kin - and by the way from multitasking you always have this button in the bottom left corner that said recent it brought up four tiles and from there you could jump to another application so here it is it's loading on the screen you can swipe around it hasn't finished loading yet so you know a little bit choppy and again sum-sum checkerboards it has multi-touch although the screen is kind of small and so it makes a little bit imprecise to to zoom in with a pinch feature there so not really a good web browser the kitten couldn't really do web browsing that well I'll be back here on the application list and it says apps in the upper left corner there we can jump into camera and by the way kins studio was a really cool add-on for the kin what it let you do is manage all of your text messages and contacts and your pictures right from the cloud from any web browser it even in this cool Timeline view that lets you go back in time it's kind of like htcsense.com a lot of the manufacturers are doing this now they're connecting the phone with a web portal so right now we just jumped back into the browser it looks like so we're going to go back again to the screen so we can search we can jump into settings and everything was kind of slow you got a splash screen and then the settings with load and from here you can change the themes not that much customizability in terms of how you can change the look and feel you just had a variety of color schemes and you could you'd have to restart your phone in order to apply one of them in particular let's go back again music and more this would actually work with Zune it was with the first Windows Phone to work with Zune which of course is a pretty cool music subscription service you paid 15 bucks a month you get unlimited music downloads kind of like Spotify actually and you log in with your zoo and pass you could also download movies and that sort of thing just like you can do now with Windows Phone 7 so really good multimedia integration with the Kin see what else we have here that we can talk about the email app was was good enough it wasn't anything amazing we've got a simple alarm feed reader again no third-party apps nothing much that you can do beyond the basics I mean it was basically a feature phone trying to be a smart phone or another way you could look at it as a smart phone that was trying to be a feature phone but they missed the pricing they missed the execution it was just bad timing at a time when smart phones were becoming very affordable and the people that they were targeting kind of the youthful crowd we're aspiring to get smartphones and they got them because they are they were inexpensive and the data plan was the same cost as on the Kin so some fatal errors there that is why the Kin didn't really make it interesting idea the bad timing and and a not ideal execution do you remember the Kin if so let us know in the comments if you had a kin we want to hear from you if you still use a kin that would be pretty cool for you to tell us what you think about the kin after using it for a while they close the kin studio so there's not much functionality left with this device well the word on the street is that they didn't sell many of these at all so it's very unlikely than anyone watching this video actually has one if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now