SevenDeadySins
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Switched On: Kin's seven deadly sins
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. There may have been a lot of behind-the-scenes machinations at Microsoft and Verizon that resulted in the discontinuation of the Kin One and the Kin Two, but there were also many marketplace miscues that resulted in the demise of the handsets. Here, then, were Kin's seven deadly sins: Lust. With the Kin handsets, Microsoft was too eager to get its hands into the pockets of young social networkers for whom the smartphone market had proven elusive. The key paradox of this was that the Kin data plan was the same for that of other smartphones at Verizon, and that continued to shut out those who aspired to mobile digital sharing nirvana. Gluttony. If Microsoft was angling to get Verizon to offer a sweetheart deal for Kin data, it certainly didn't help its cause with the automatic backup of rich media to the Kin Studio website. If there was one aspect to the Kin handsets operation that may pave the way toward future success, it was the Silverlight-based web interface to all the media that was captured with the device. This also allowed Microsoft and Sharp to minimize the amount of on-device storage. However, constantly backing up high-resolution photos and even standard-definition videos to the cloud required a lot of bandwidth, making it difficult for Verizon to justify a "light" data usage plan for Kin users.
