I was actually just at a Verizon store and got a chance to see both Kin devices in person. I wasn't expecting to be blown away by any means, but I was amazed at how bad they were.
The physical construction seemed fine, but the interface was so choppy it was hardly usable, and the colors looked really washed out. Noticeably worse than the LG and Samsung dumbphones sitting next to it.
With a browser and reasonably powerful components, it could have been a nice complement to the Zune lines. My guess was that it was just a field test for MS cloud services for mobile users, and for some reason they didn't want to do it with Windows Mobile.
When the left on life support back end data loss occurred we heard a lot about how terribly clueless the management of Project Pink was and how terribly unhappy the assimilated into Pink Danger employees were.
Disaster was expected, predicted, etc., the interesting question as others have noted is why did Microsoft take so long, spend so much money to realize it.
The physical construction seemed fine, but the interface was so choppy it was hardly usable, and the colors looked really washed out. Noticeably worse than the LG and Samsung dumbphones sitting next to it.
With a browser and reasonably powerful components, it could have been a nice complement to the Zune lines. My guess was that it was just a field test for MS cloud services for mobile users, and for some reason they didn't want to do it with Windows Mobile.