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.
