Greenville Business Magazine 2010 June issue : Page 51The Kin is a cell phone that elicits an visceral response from anyone who sees it. It’s fun and odd in a cool way, but I’ll have to warn you that on at least one occasion, the reaction I got from a friend was chortling. Carry the kin with you to a social event and someone may think you’ve stolen the phone from a Japanese school girl. Unlike anything else I’ve ever carried, the Kin is a palm sized square screen that slides up to reveal a spiffy looking keyboard. Based on Windows, the Kin is cute, cool, very funky and frequently infuriating to use. It loads all your Twitter and Facebook friends and then displays their updates over their profile pictures as the home screen display. Snappy looking speech balloons alert you to missed calls, and although the phone will integrate with email accounts from a variety of providers, it best connects to Windows Live Hotmail. If using Hotmail it will sync contacts as well as your mail to the phone. Once configured, the Kin allows you to see every photo, call, sms text message sent by or received to the phone on the Kin Studio website. The website offers a very attractive console which shows all of the phone activity in a timeline fashion and it allows you to manage the phone and it’s pictures from there. The website also gives you the choice of sharing pictures from the phone with your facebook and social network friends from either the website of the phone itself. It really is cool, but did I mention infuriating? On a phone this small your hands always seems to touching one of the buttons and doing something you didn’t intend, and it goes beyond accidental dialing. Even when the phone is locked you can change the volume of the ringer either inad- vertently sending the phone into silent mode or setting yourself up for a very loud surprise at some unexpected moment. The phone menu uses a Zune like interface with word in large letters as the buttons, but finding the option you were looking for always seemed harder than it needed to be. I think someone who loves the web interface may be willing to overlook the frustrating bits of this phone in order to have the cool factor. Let me know if that person is you. ■ JUNE 2010 | GREENVILLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE 51 Kin Publication List |
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