Microsoft Kin One and Two review
Make no mistake: the Kin One and Two are coming into the world as the black sheep of the phone industry, and Microsoft would have it no other way. Straddling the fence somewhere between a dedicated smartphone and high-spec featurephone …
Context & Ripple Effects
The phone experiment Reuters flagged in early April now has hardware in reviewers' hands: Engadget's verdict frames the Kin One and Two as deliberate 'black sheep,' straddling the line between dedicated smartphone and high-spec featurephone. That lands a long way from the September 2009 report predicting two direct iPhone competitors — what shipped reads less like an iPhone rival than a category of its own.
The timing matters because Microsoft is running several mobile bets in parallel: the Kin line, the Hewlett-Packard Windows 7 tablet Steve Ballmer showed at CES slated for mid-2010, and FUSE Labs' new Spindex social aggregator, launched this week under Ray Ozzie's sponsorship. A rumored project codenamed 'Menlo,' reported with details scarce, adds to the sense that Microsoft's mobile strategy is still being cut.
First-order effects
- Kin enters the market without a clean competitive lane: reviewers position it above featurephones but below dedicated smartphones, so buyers must weigh it against both classes rather than a single benchmark device.
- The launch lands days after FUSE Labs introduced Spindex, leaving Microsoft with two highly visible social-experiment projects live in the same week.
Second-order effects
- Because the 2009 leak framed these devices as iPhone competitors, their featurephone-leaning positioning puts them in an awkward pricing gap — Apple and Android handset makers face no direct pressure to respond, while Kin absorbs the comparison cost.
- If 'Menlo' proves real, Microsoft's own roadmap uncertainty becomes a sales problem: carriers and developers weighing the Kin platform must hedge against a strategy that may be re-cut mid-cycle.
Third-order effects
- Devices that straddle categories tend to lose both sides of the market; if the pattern holds, expect pressure inside Microsoft to consolidate its parallel experiments around a single flagship platform rather than niche hardware lines.
- Carriers facing category-ambiguous devices have an incentive to demand clearer smartphone tiering from vendors, pushing the industry toward binary smart/feature segmentation and squeezing products designed to live between the two.
The trend: Microsoft's 2010 mobile posture is a portfolio of parallel experiments — Kin, Windows Phone, tablets, FUSE Labs social tools — testing whether a software giant can chase niches without diluting its core platform bet.