The new Kin channel on YouTube documents a girl named Rosa’s adventures as she tries to find out if she’s really friends with the people she’s friends with online by going to visit them. Not bad…

I also just saw a post over at PocketNow in which they’re impressed by the number of Facebook fans on the Kin page (over 30,000). I’m not – I think Microsoft might have a hit on their hands.

Check out the Kin YouTube channel here.

Since iPhone OS3-and-under iPhones and iPod Touches won’t be upgradeable to iPhone OS4, Apple will inevitably end up with iPhone users wanting to run apps their devices don’t support, and possibly unable to re-install their OS or legacy apps after a crash or a hard reset. Chuong goes on to compare this to the fragmentation troubles that Android now finds itself facing and from which Windows Mobile has long suffered.

He correctly points out that the schism in Apple’s case comes from a software update, not hardware differences. In Android-land, the fragmentation comes not only by way of software updates (from both Google and the open-source community) but also from hardware differences between devices, like strange screen resolutions, differing CPUs, GPUs and form factors, touchscreen/not touchscreen, etc.

And Microsoft?

Microsoft was a victim of its own moderate early success. Back when it was Palm and Windows Mobile ruling the early, pre-iPhone, PDA/smarphone show, Microsoft got locked into supporting the thousands and thousands of apps that were written for the platform. Massive enterprises adopted Windows Mobile solutions and professional, corporate and enterprise software was written and distributed to millions of users… whom Microsoft could not abandon.

Yes, yes, they also suffer from the same troubles as Android with differing OS versions and wacky hardware out there, but all of that was manageable for a veteran OS company like Microsoft (more later).

In fact, I really feel for poor Microsoft! I remember my first WinMo device – a UT Starcom PPC6700 running Windows Mobile 5: my buddy Crabtree dubbed it “the pocket instrument of mass destruction”, and I was just blown away by what it could do – with a little persuasion – and by how little it couldn’t do. That was in the spring of 2005, and I’m so sad that 5 years later I’ve still got something almost identical in my pocket! Why?

Dang legacy users! What do you do with your legacy users!?

So while Apple and Google waltzed in late to the party with their killer mobile OSes – so nice and finely tuned thanks to the lessons learned through the early travails of Palm, Microsoft, Compaq and others – Microsoft was still trying to figure out what to do with their legacy users.

Well, after 5 years of thought, deliberation, study, the multi-year Project Pink and the massive consumer research project that started before it, Muse, the purchase of Danger and their SideKick device… and Microsoft has finally came up with their answer to legacy users: dump them!

By biting the bullet and committing to no backwards compatibility in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft positions itself pretty nicely for this next round of the smartphone wars, as Microsoft is very familiar with supporting multiple OSes on a wide variety of hardware. With the introduction of the Kin line of devices this week, Microsoft now has three mobile lines going:

1. Windows Phone 7,
2. Windows Phone Classic (Windows Mobile 6.5x), and
3. Kin (essentially the new, bottom-of-the-line dumb phones of the future)

This is a very manageable plate for Microsoft. The Kin are no-brainers, nothing to support there. Windows Phone Classic, still building on CE (despite its well-justified critics) is a pretty mature OS and Microsoft continues to fine-tune it.

Perhaps most importantly – and annoyingly for us fanboys – Windows Phone 7 devices will be the only smartphones that don’t support natively written apps, which means Microsoft won’t get caught in this legacy user situation again. Apple and Google, meanwhile, will be facing this challenge for some time to come!

Grin ;)

Welcome to the Legacy-User club, Apple! We ‘Softies call it the L-User Club! Oh, you too, Google!

Microsoft insists on releasing dumb phone without apps? We were thinking and thinking and the only explanation is: extreme incompetence.

Edward from MSMobiles.recently posted about a survey showing teens want iPhones and extrapolated that this means they won’t want the app-less Kin devices. As I posted earlier, my teenage daughter was gushing over the Kin One as I was watching some videos on it yesterday – the phone is cool and focuses on the features that are important to her (taking pictures of herself and putting them up on facebook mainly).

The whole world is app-happy these days, but I really like Microsoft’s push away from the app and towards the experience-centric model that we see in Windows Phone 7. I may sound like an Apple fanboy here, but do we really care which app we’re using to do all the basic functions we expect from a smartphone? When I take a picture on the skihill, do I want to fiddle around with different apps to get that pic to my Facebook account, up to Twitter, then to MMS it to my brother to rub it in? No – I want to click a button and have it done quickly and easily… just like my kid wants.

I do want to be able to install new apps to extend the functionality of my device, but I does my teenage daughter? Not really. I watch her data usage on her BlackBerry like a hawk, and she only uses a few megs/month – all Facebook and social network updates. These new Kin devices are targeted at her and her contemporaries… and I think Microsoft has aimed just right.

Engadget has posted a funny little commercial that mocks the Kin commercials that have been floating around the web already. Pretty funny.

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Not much to describe here… there’s one above (which features the Kin Studio), and here’s the other:

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…

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Once Again the guys at PocketNow are making me jealous, as they nab an ex-employee/current-Softie to give them a walk-through of the new Kin One and Kin Two devices announced by Microsoft.

The video above is a walk-through of the Kin One and some of the cool new Kin features, like the Kin Loop and the Kin Spot, the Zune software and the ZunePass, and the very connected 5 megapixel camera.

This next video is a nice tour of the Kin Two, which is the bigger, “bolder” Kin that features an 8 megapixel, HD-video capable camera and 8 gigs of storage (compared to 4 on the Kin One).

The charming young lady explains how the Kin Spot is “THE new way to share”, and how it skips the apps and focuses directly on the services and networks. This video includes a full demo of how the camera works and stores everything in the cloud, with a nice demo of the Kin Studio, too.

These Kin phones look terrific. I showed them to my 15-year-old daughter and she hasn’t stopped bugging me: “when can I upgrade!?” Luckily/sadly, while Verizon and Vodafone customers can expect these devices to drop next month, no word yet on who will carry them in Canada.

I hope at the very Microsoft upgrades MyPhone to work more like the Kin Studio – that’s awesome!

[via and via]

Built by Sharp, the two new Kin 1 and Kin 2 phones are heavy on the cameras! Microsoft has placed a huge emphasis on the quality of the cameras, “especially in dim light”, on the Kin 1 and Kin 2, which feature a 5 and 8 megapixel camera respectively. The Kin 2 even shoots 720p video.

Still on the multimedia side, the Kin phones will both ship with Zune app, including the Zune Service.

The Kin Loop

Kin takes the ‘hub’ idea of Windows Phone 7 and brings it to a lower-end, ‘amplified, not simplified’ OS. The Kin Loop is a customizable contact screen that pulls in the latest social networking feeds from all your friends. The latest Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and, of course, Windows Live updates will be pulled right onto the phone.

The Kin Spot

The Kin Spot is a cool feature that allows users to drag items from pretty much any screen onto “the spot” – pics, videos, web pges, search results, even contacts, then send them, txt them, upload them or otherwise begin a conversation with those items Everything is also geo-tagged, so you can pull up your pics on a Bing map. Cool ideas.

Kin Studio

Microsof’t’s MyPhone on steroids, the Kin phones automatically store everything you do – pictures, videos and communications – and displays them to you on a "timeline”. Almost creepy, but with the way our phones are integrated into our lives these days I suppose it makes sense.

Applications

The Kin 1 and Kin 2 also feature some essential and solid looking apps, namely a handy global search, a decent looking web browser that includes pinch-and-zoom.

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Microsoft has teamed up with Verizon and Vodafone for distribution and – just before signing off with the “the new Kin: the phone experience that connects what you love to the people you love – Microsoft said the phones would appear on shelves in May.

It would be easy to assume that the Kin is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction designed to stop the hemorrhaging while they get Windows Phone 7 to market. After all, Apple has just announced their iPhone OS4 and and dropped the iPad, and Android is grabbing market share quickly.

But let’s not forget that Project Pink has been around for years now, so this is not a reactionary move. Microsoft has made no secret of their plans to keep Windows Mobile 6.5x devices around under the “Classic” brand, so perhaps these Kin devices will stick around in the long run be lower-functioning family of devices.

Regardless of the future of the devices, the Kin Studio is not a product that was developed on the side. I firmly believe we’ll see this incorporated into the MyPhone experience and integrated tightly into both the Zune and Windows Phone 7 devices, plus I’m sure your XBox world.

To me, the most revolutionary thing about what I’ve seen of Windows Phone 7 is the reorganization of data around the hub idea, and that seems to be the biggest feature of these new Kin phones (in form of the Kin Loop). In that sense, I’m really eager to see how the market receives the Kin.

We’ll surely be digesting this announcement for a while… any thoughts from you guys though?