Microsoft’s KIN phone platform was an interesting experiment. The phones combined aspects of smartphones and standard phones, by letting you access social networking sites, manage media, and perform other web-based activities without installing third party apps. Probably the most interesting part of the KIN experience was the KIn Studio, a web-based system allowing you to manage and access your phone’s data from any web browser.

Unfortunately, the KIN experiment was a pretty big failure. Few phones were sold, and now we’re finding that Microsoft will shut down the KIN Studio on January 31st, 2011 — erasing a lot of the functionality of a KIN phone in the process. So if you’re one of the few people who has purchased a KIN handset, it might be time to upgrade. Verizon’s reportedly making it easy by offering KIN users free 3G enabled phones between now and March 31st.

So what exactly happens to KIN phones after January 31st? They lose the ability to post updates or photos to social networking sites, the feed reader stops working, search near me stops working, contacts from your social networks won’t appear anymore, and basically your phone will only be useful for making calls, streaming Zune Pass music, and sending email.

WP Central has a run-down of all the features that will disappear when KIN Studio goes offline.

While the truth of the matter is that very few people will be affected by the death of the KIN Studio, it does show what happens when you adopt a platform where most of your data is stored in the cloud… and the service provider decides to stop supporting the service. While there are certainly benefits of moving to a cloud-based data system where much of our information is accessible anywhere you can get online, it often feels like we’re moving from a system where you own your data to one where you lease it until someone decides to take it away from you.

Well that didn’t take long. Just a little over two months after introducing a new feature phone platform, Microsoft is killing off the KIN project.

The KIN platform was basically a stripped down Windows CE-based operating system with a heavy focus on social media apps and no support for third party apps. It was aimed at young people who wanted to do more than make calls and send text messages with their phones, but who didn’t want or need a full fledged smartphone and app store.

It’s not entirely clear if that market actually exists. But it’s likely that a bigger problem was that the first two KIN phones shipped with monthly data plans that were priced about the same as a smartphone data plan.

Microsoft plans to continue offering the KIN One and KIN Two phones in the US for a while — probably until the current stock is sold out. But the company will not launch the phones in Europe as had been planned, and the KIN team will join the Windows Phone 7 team, which means that the standalone KIN platform is for all intents and purposes dead. But we may see some of the KIN technology in Windows Phone 7 down the road.

Like the look and feel of Microsoft’s new Kin phones, but don’t feel like buying a phone that won’t actually let you run third party apps? No problem. KinLauncher is an app that provides a Kin-like program launcher for Windows Mobile.

The user interface sort of falls apart once you actually click a link on the program launcher and realize that you’re still stuck with the default Windows Mobile (or HTC Sense) web browser, email, phone, and other apps. But at least KinLauncher makes the home screen a lot… greener.

You can also customize the buttons on the program launcher, although the default options look pretty decent with messaging, phone, email, browser, music, camera, settings, alarm, recent, and The Spot buttons.

KinLauncher is available as a free download for Windows Mobile. You can check out a video of the app in action after the break.

via xda-developers

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There’s a space in between modern smartphones like the iPhone or Google Nexus One and old fashioned phones that do little more than make phone calls. The T-Mobile Sidekick, for instance, is a feature-phone that lets you surf the web and chat, but which doesn’t support third party apps.

Now Microsoft is hoping to jump into feature phone space in a big way. The company introduced KIN today. KIN is a new cellphone platform with a heavy focus on social networking and sharing. The two phones Microsoft is introducing will let you connect to Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Twitter, and other services to share photos, videos, text messages, and other items.

Incidentally, that T-Mobile Sidekick I mentioned? It was made by a company called Danger… a company which Microsoft acquired a while back.

Sounds like a smartphone, right? But while the user interface looks a little bit like the Windows Phone 7 tiled UI, don’t expect any support for third party apps. The phone does what it does — which is to make calls, surf the web, check email, chat, take pictures, and share information. There’s a music player and a video player.

Microsoft is targeting young folks with the KIN. In fact, it’s particularly aimed at connected kids who are used to being able to share everything with their phones and computers.

The KIN user interface is built around sharing, and you can drag any content on your phone to a “Spot,” which is a little green area near the bottom that you can use to almost instantly upload photos, videos, and other content to social networking sites.

At launch, it looks like there will be two phones: The KIN One and KIN Two. The Two looks like a typical touchscreen smartphone with a sliding keyboard. The KIN One on the other hand, is a tiny litle guy that’s pretty much square shaped )with rounded edges), and a slide-out keyboard that’s much smaller. The KIN One has a 5MP webcam and 4GB of stroage while the KIN Two has 8GB of storage and an 8MP webcam that can shoot HD video. Both have Zune-powered media players.

There’s also web-based software called the KIN Studio that you can use to organize your data (photos, videos, text messages, etc). What’s interesting is that since KIN Studio is based in the cloud, you can sync your data with the KIN studio without connecting your phone to the computer.  This means if you lose your phone you can also use the KIN Studio software to preserve your data.

Update: It’s not just third party apps that KIN is missing. Laptop Magazine points out there’s also no calendar or instant messaging app. And for some strange reason you can’t share pictures via Twitter. It’s like nobody told Microsoft about URL shorteners or Twitpic.

via Engadget and MobileCrunch