The Microsoft KIN received an end-of-life a little over a week ago. This was caused mainly due to low sales numbers, but exactly how bad did it sell? John Gruber from the Daring Fireball has received info from a “well-placed” source that only 503 KINs were sold.
Business Insider quotes another Microsoft employee:
We had a huge launch party on campus and I bet that party cost more than the amount of revenues we took in on the product. As an employee, I am embarrassed. As a shareholder, I am pissed. It’s one thing to incubate products and bring them to a proof-of-concept to see what works, but it’s something else to launch. I suspect we launched because we felt like we HAD to so we could save face because we were trying to build buzz, but overall – huge fail.
Microsoft today made a surprise move when they decided to kill the KIN series. Microsoft’s PR people had the following to say:
We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.”
So, there you have it, we’re not going to see a KIN device in Europe. R.I.P. KIN.
When Microsoft announced the Kin One and Kin Two, they said that it will be available in May.
Now we can confirm that both Kin phones are coming to Verizon Wireless on May 13th, with pre-orders online on May 6th. No word on when it will arrive to UK.
Here is an interesting new feature seen on a Microsoft Kin phone. Skip to the 30 second mark in the video and you’ll see an interesting feature of Kin Spot. You can see content being dragged from one application, and later dropped into another application.
So instead of copy and pasting, you can now simply drag and drop content between applications. A really interesting technology, that I personally would love to see in Windows Phone 7.
