This Is The Worst Cell Phone of All Time

0:00 Picture it: It’s the spring of 2010.

0:02 Plenty of things from this time will be remembered: the oil spill,

0:06 the Affordable Care Act, Hot Tub Time Machine, et al.

0:09 Other things will be completely forgotten.

0:11 Like this: the Microsoft Kin, the worst cell phone ever brought to market.

0:15 Microsoft pumped a billion dollars into developing this thing,

0:19 and people hated it—so much so that they didn’t even sell ten thousand units,

0:24 and by some reports, they only sold five hundred… and three.

0:28 Just 48 days after release,

0:29 they pulled the Kin from the shelves and hoped we would forget it ever happened.

0:32 But here at HAI, we remember.

0:34 And we ordered one from eBay.

0:36 And today, we’re talking about all the brilliant choices

0:38 Microsoft made that made this thing a colossal failure.

0:41 The Kin arrived in that window where cell phones were everywhere,

0:43 but smartphones were still more of a luxury.

0:45 The idea of the Kin was to make a lower-priced,

0:48 non-smartphone that catered to the younger, social media-loving crowd.

0:51 A core feature was something called the “Kin Loop.” Basically,

0:55 a home screen where all your communications, like texts and calls,

0:57 but also emails and posts from the people you follow on Facebook,

1:00 Twitter, and MySpace, would show up in one big chronological feed.

1:03 That feed also appeared on Kin Studio, a website you could open in any browser,

1:08 basically putting your phone on the internet.

1:10 That was convenient,

1:11 but also helped the Kin get away with not being as “smart” as a smartphone;

1:15 See, the Kin didn’t actually connect to Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace.

1:18 It just connected to Kin Studio,

1:20 which itself was doing the work of pulling the data from social media.

1:23 Essentially, Kin Studio was the neighborhood

1:25 gossip who went around learning everyone’s business,

1:27 and the Kin itself was where you met up

1:29 with said neighborhood gossip to get all the juicy details.

1:31 Again, none of this is, in and of itself, a terrible idea:

1:34 Creating a phone targeted at a younger,

1:36 more social-media-y consumer with a sub-smartphone price could have worked.

1:39 I mean, it even had “a Zune experience.” But in practice,

1:43 it was a massive, overly expensive, hardly functional flopzilla.

1:47 Here’s a brief survey of some of the Kin’s issues.

1:50 The “Loop” at the center of the user interface,

1:52 which was supposed to be the young user’s 24/7 IV drip of social media content,

1:56 only updated itself when you told it to, or every fifteen minutes.

1:59 The social media clients built into the phone were weird in and of themselves:

2:03 on Facebook, you could only see and post status updates.

2:06 No friending, liking, poking, commenting, or anything else.

2:09 Twitter was similar: you could see and post tweets,

2:12 but you couldn’t view replies or search or post photos.

2:14 And I don’t know what the MySpace client could do,

2:17 but the site was already on a steep decline, so who even cared?

2:20 Also, there was no app store.

2:21 Which would be one thing if the phone could do everything a hip

2:24 2010-er would want it to, but the Kin phones lacked a calendar,

2:28 a calculator, voice notes, any kind of maps,

2:30 a standalone YouTube app and, worst of all, games.

2:32 How am I supposed to use a phone with no games?

2:35 Also, if your phone is supposed to be “deeply social,”

2:37 it’s a pretty big oversight to lock it in with Facebook,

2:39 Twitter, and MySpace, and have no way to add or change those apps going forward.

2:43 Instagram launched six months after the Kin,

2:45 and Snapchat came about a year later.

2:47 So without knowing, the Kin was halfway to obsolescence upon release.

2:51 But the whole point was to be cheaper than the iPhones of the era,

2:53 so is it such an issue that it was also worse?

2:57 Certainly not.

2:58 But—oops!—it also wasn’t that much cheaper.

3:00 The Kin One itself initially retailed for 150 bucks,

3:03 and the slightly swaggier Kin Two,

3:05 which had a bigger screen and a better camera but all the same problems,

3:08 went for two hundred—though it was pretty

3:10 easy to get a hundred bucks off either.

3:11 So they cost less than the two- to three-hundred dollar iPhone 3GS,

3:14 but uh-oh, what’s this?

3:16 Buying the phone locked you into a mandatory two-year plan with Verizon?

3:19 With a forty dollar minimum monthly charge for calling,

3:21 and a thirty dollar minimum charge for data?

3:23 And unlimited texting would be 20 bucks on top of that?

3:26 Yes to all of the above.

3:28 You, the consumer, were expected to pay almost—if not more—than

3:31 the phone cost every single month just to use it.

3:34 Meaning the people the phone was supposed to be for—who wanted smartphone

3:37 features at brick-phone prices—couldn’t afford

3:38 the monthly costs of owning a Kin, and any rational consumer that could afford

3:42 that and wanted Kin’s purported services would be

3:45 much better off saving up just a little

3:47 bit more money and just… buying a smartphone.

3:49 Perhaps this is why the Kin Facebook

3:51 application only ever had 8,810 active users: This phone just wasn’t for anyone.

3:57 Microsoft announced the Kins One and Two in April 2010.

4:00 They went on sale on May 14th.

4:03 The reviews were mid to bad, with some praising the idea of Kin Studio,

4:06 but with just about everything else universally panned.

4:09 On June 29th, they dropped the price of the One

4:12 to thirty bucks and the Two to fifty.

4:14 On July 1st, they announced they were abandoning the Kin product line entirely,

4:18 including scrapping the European rollout they’d planned,

4:19 and shifting the team that worked on it

4:21 to work on the next Windows Phone instead.

4:24 An anonymous executive was quoted around the time saying, in simple terms,

4:27 that the Kin One “was killed abruptly because no one was buying it and there

4:31 was no credible reason to believe anyone

4:33 would,” which strikes me as solid reasoning.

4:35 A post-mortem on Engadget described the Kin

4:37 as, “practically raw in the middle,” which is unfair,

4:39 because a cookie that’s practically raw in the middle is delicious,

4:42 and the Kin tastes awful.

4:44 I know because I made my writer try to eat it.

4:46 So how does a product this flawed get to the market?

4:49 Developing the Kin took two years, and the first step,

4:52 for Microsoft, was acquiring a company called Danger.

4:54 Danger had made the Sidekick,

4:56 the coolest and most iconic phone ever—I’m editorializing,

4:59 but I really wanted one—and Microsoft wanted to use their IP

5:03 and cloud computing expertise to build their new line of cool kid phones.

5:07 They spent half a billion dollars to acquire Danger

5:09 and proceeded to squander every opportunity that acquisition offered them.

5:12 They decided that, instead of using either the Sidekick’s

5:15 operating system or the existing Windows Phone’s operating system,

5:18 they’d develop a bespoke one for the Kin

5:20 that took forever and cost tons of money.

5:23 The delays angered Verizon, who by the time of launch were mad

5:26 enough at Microsoft that they ditched the cheap

5:28 plan they’d intended for the Kin and went

5:29 instead for the expensive mandatory one that rolled out,

5:31 on the grounds that all that uploading would eat a lot of data.

5:34 By the time of the launch,

5:35 nobody involved in the Kin was that into it: Danger was gutted,

5:38 Microsoft knew it sucked but had a contractual obligation to Verizon to fulfill,

5:42 and in Verizon stores, employees were cautioning people against buying them.

5:46 Allegedly, many of these poor decisions boiled

5:48 down to weird politics within Microsoft and between

5:50 its divisions that caused people to ignore

5:52 the product’s problems and set it up to fail.

5:54 Why this infighting had to ultimately hurt the small handful of people who

5:57 fell for it all and bought the Kin anyway, I do not know.

6:00 It’s a cruel world.

6:01 Perhaps the final nail in the Kin’s coffin, though, was its marketing.

6:04 We can set aside Microsoft marketing two different lines of phones

6:07 that didn’t really share features

6:09 or an operating system—though that was confusing.

6:11 I’m talking about this ad, in all its 2010 faux-hipster glory,

6:14 showing a bunch of people using a Kin while this band

6:17 performs that “Alabama Arkansas” song that was so big at the time.

6:20 This ad does not tell you about Kin Studio,

6:22 allegedly the best thing about the phone.

6:24 What it does do, however, is show a seeming teenager taking an up-the-shirt

6:27 pic and sending it to some girl,

6:29 which didn’t necessarily have parents of the world

6:31 clamoring to get their teens this phone.

6:32 All to say, inside out and top to bottom,

6:34 every wrong decision was made to create this piece of junk,

6:37 but thanks to, basically, contracts,

6:39 it was sold anyway, for just 48 glorious days.

6:42 And now, even if you buy one on eBay,

6:44 the folks at the Verizon store can’t get it working for you,

6:46 and it’s toured the world in the Museum of Failure.

6:50 Not a bad paperweight, though.

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