The Kin ran an operating system based on Windows CE.
And they wonder why it failed?
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Damn I miss that form factor
I don't. I had a phone like that with Verizon and the top would fly off after opening it the 100th time. I would get a replacement and 3 weeks later the same thing would happen. After the 6th replacement they finally let me switch to a flip phone of the same value.
How hard were you opening it?!
Not hard at all, it had a spring so you only had to push it a little bit and it would do the rest. The spring action was very snappy... I am sure other phone manufacturers got it right, but I am still traumatized.
I had a HTC Evo Shift 4G back in the day, similar style:
Loved it for typing.
it's crazy to me that american carriers can basically hold hardware ransom.
Granted this was 15 years ago. The market was a lot different than it is now.
That being said, most people still buy their phones through their carrier. So whatever the carrier sales reps get paid the most to sell is what they push people towards.
Yeah, but carrier locked phones are illegal in many places (and always have been), aren't they still allowed in the US?
Well considering the article is about a product launch in the US... seems relevant. Carrier locking isn't illegal at all in the US.
They didn't even used to have to unlock it once a contract was over, not that most carriers at the time would allow unlocked phones on their network anyway, they do at least have to do that now.
I miss hardware-keyboards so much... My love was a Xperia Mini Pro. Damn fine phone.
I miss blackberry.
I do and don't at the same time. I loved the classic hardware T9, but it gave me carpal tunnel.
You and me both and the very tiny amount of phones available right now with keyboards are just not that great. Blackberry still made the best phones ever IMO, the KeyTwo was fucking awesome.
Someone should make hardware in that form factor that is essentially a Raspberry Pi-style machine one can run one’s own system on.
No apps or games just social media. I see why it failed
Eh. Apps were still fairly new in 2010. It launched around the same time as the iPhone 4. Heck, the iPhone was still officially only available from AT&T at the time.
It looked like a knockoff iPhone 3G with a slide out keyboard, so it was at least twice the size. Lack of apps and social media weren't what killed the Kin.
Apps were still kinda new at the time and social media was shit hot. iPhones were still premium products and most people didn’t have one.
I think a lot of people don’t realise that when the iPhone first came out it didn’t have apps. They eventually released an upgrade so that you could pin webpages to the homepage. I remember Apple arguing that web stuff was so good now you didn’t need apps.
From what I recall around that time the Kin never really generated that much interest. It wasn’t being aimed as a product to replace the iPhone and was targeted at the kind of people who nowadays would sit on their phone and scroll TikTok. There was a lot of change in those days; social media was still pretty new, useful internet in your phone was pretty new (it’d been around for years but it wasn’t so expensive to this point nobody had used it, iPhone made constant internet connections a thing) touch screens were still new and sexy, and more I forget about. The idea that your phone was this little mobile computer that you carried around wasn’t really there yet and they were still mostly for communicating.
Microsoft seem to be the kin of failed mobile products
For context, in 2010 Apple had just released the iPhone 4 and BlackBerry had the Bold & Pearl.
Why doesn’t anyone want sliding keyboard phone that shamelessly looks like a knockoff iPhone 3G and runs none of those apps?
Why is this on shitpost? Not complaining. Just curious. Sometimes the conventions of lemmy elude me, but I want to be on board.
I actually loved my Kin Twom. Didn't require a data plan, had a decent camera, was a joy to text on.
me too actually!
The point of the Kin was that it was supposed to create a new service tier in between dumb phones and smart phones with expensive plans. At the time phones came with 2 year contracts that subsidized the cost of the phone. A basic plan came with $175 worth of subsidy which covered a dumb phone. If you added $30/month for unlimited data, you would get $350 off the the up front cost of a smart phone.
Microsoft's idea was that parents didn't want to pay that much for a smart phone for their teens. But a teen would get plenty of benefit from something in between which would allow them to use a non SMS messaging service and browse social media. Plus it had a keyboard.
It's still Verizon's fault. But it wasn't lack of promotion. The Kin didn't make sense without the accompanying plan.