Microsoft has outed Project Pink, and the result is the Kin One and Kin Two. The phones are almost smartphones but in a more limited role, and the company is aiming them squarely at social networking savvy teens and young adults. The interface design is highly interactive and focuses on owner cliques — the friends that are in the user’s inner circle. Sharing information among members of these cliques is drag and drop simple, and the phones are aimed at keeping everyone in the loop aware of what everyone else is doing. After a day in the limelight, the Kin phones are a big question mark for me.
The hardware side of the Kin One and Two is gorgeous. Microsoft and Sharp obviously spent a lot of time getting this right, and it shows. The little turtle Kin fits in the hand perfectly, and the bigger Kin is a sexy QWERTY phone which draws all attention to the screen. The Kin One has a keyboard too, it’s just smaller. Both phones seem to be built to stand up to the usage of the demographic at which they are aimed, and that’s a good thing as the young adult segment is hard on phones. I know that for a fact, as handset insurance for our teen’s phones was considered a necessity right behind groceries. They are very hard on phones.
The OS on the Kins is a bit of a question for me. It’s kind of like Windows Phone 7 light. Grids move around on the screen, each tile representing a friend, and communicating with them is as simple as dragging stuff onto the “spot”. The creation of tiers of friends, or favorites, is a clever way to deal with the hundreds of friends that many have on the major social networks. It’s kind of a “real friends” tier that I suspect is where most Kin owners will spend a lot of their attention.
There are no apps on the Kin, and I can’t believe that Microsoft and the carriers that will carry the phones will leave it at that. There is simply too much money to be made at either the phone or the carrier level on apps. I suspect we’ll see Kin stores at least at the carrier level. The social networking stuff on the Kin is pretty nice, and the inclusion of Zune is great. I just don’t think it will be enough for either Kin owners nor the corporate players without apps.
The most important factor in whether the Kins will be big sellers wasn’t even mentioned in the hoopla yesterday — pricing. The Kin phone is aimed squarely at the demographic that would love the iPhone or other smartphone, yet can’t afford the phone nor the monthly plan. This segment is dependent on others to approve (and pay) for that commitment, which is why they often still have feature phones. That’s going to be a big factor in Kin sales, so the plan has got to be dirt cheap to get parents onboard.
Images courtesy Microsoft
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