Verizon brings back Microsoft’s Kin as feature phones — tech world says “I told you so”
As easy as it is to ridicule the Kin phones (even Microsoft employees hated them), they could actually make decent feature phones. The problem is that they should have been feature phones from the start — instead Verizon marketed them as smartphones and paired them with expensive data plans. When faced with the option of paying the same $29.99 monthly data plan for a killer Android phone like the original Droid, it’s no surprise that the Kin phones died an early death.
With feature phone data pricing, perhaps somewhere between $10 and $15 a month, the Kin phones can actually appeal to the youth demographic Microsoft completely misread the first time around. The phones will be losing the data-heavy “Loop” feature — which automatically uploaded user’s pictures and other media up to a personalized website
Still, the phones will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s Zune Pass, which offers users unlimited access to music for $15 a month. At this point, the Kin phones are more like Windows Phone 7-lite, as they should have been from the start.
No comments:
Post a Comment