Engadget is reporting that the just-announced Kin social media phones from Microsoft and Sharp are going to have a 15-minute delay in their ‘real-time’ updates from social networks. Quoting a Microsoft Engineer, the report blames battery life and social network APIs that aren’t yet up to the task for the shortcoming, thus the Microsoft servers will only ping the Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace servers every 15 minutes.
Engadget further speculates that it may be a way of giving teens – essentially the target market for the Kin phones – a way to afford an always-on’ 3G connection… by making it only “on” every 15 minutes!
Presumably this is something they can tweak down the road as a) the APIs get better and b) data rates come down…
[via]
