If the price point is right I think these are going to be smash hits with the younger crowd.<p>To me they seem quite underwhelming, but if I look at how my younger sisters & cousins use their phones then all those boxes are checked and in a very visually pleasing way.
The 'spot' seems like an interesting piece of ui. I'm interested to see how effective it is in real world use.<p>It also reminds me of the courier video, where users could clip out random parts of a webpage.<p>edit: here's more of the ui, if anyone is interested:
<a href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/microsoft-kin-ui-walkthrough/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/microsoft-kin-ui-walkthro...</a>
I wonder how long it will take for these phones to get support for 3rd party apps. While it would really be great to see more affordable (think non-luxury) smart phones, the iphone and nexus one both demonstrate that people need and want apps to enrich the experience.<p>Why bother having a camera and browser if you can't take that data (pictures, web pages, etc) and send it via email or twitter, or an edit it with an app?
If this is the fabled Zune phone, I'm extremely disappointed. I'm not sure what they mean by "social slant." Maybe they mean it's a great conversation starter. Imagine busting it out at a bar, people wouldn't be able to resist commenting on how ugly it is.
I'm sorry I don't get it. Microsoft isn't a hardware company, so there's no reason to start "diversifying" and "segmenting". Windows Phone 7 seems absolutely awesome. They need to just stick to that. As a 15 year old girl, this still ranks way way below an iPhone, Droid, or even <i>gasp</i> a palm pre. They should have just saved this type hardware (which seems pretty decent) for when they launch the Windows Phone 7 stuff. So now MSFT has:<p>-winmo 6.5 (which they're keeping) and is horrible
-KinOS (I don't know what this is supposed to do)
-Win Phone Series 7 Series Seventh Windows Phone- Which looks awesome, has developers excited, and will require OEMs to ship quality hardware.<p>Just concentrate on the last one please.