Tag: News
Uh Oh: Verizon Slashes Microsoft Kin Prices Early
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jun.28, 2010, under Gadgets, Latest Web Technologies, What's Happening?
Mobile phones from Microsoft’s socially-inclined Kin line are already getting big price cuts just a month after they hit the market. That’s good news for consumers, sure, but it might be indicative of poor sales for the handsets.
The Kin One will drop from $50 to $30, and the Kin Two will see a 50% cut from $100 to $50 as part of a broader Verizon price cut initiative, according to the The Boy Genius Report.
The Kin phones feature an innovative user interface that puts visual social activity feeds right on your home screen, and lets you share any item of interest with friends just by dragging it onto an ever-present social “Spot” icon. We were impressed with the design when we first saw it, and most everyone has probably noticed just how much marketing muscle has gone into the brand.
Unfortunately, clever design and marketing might not have been enough to compensate for poor positioning in Verizon’s phone line-up. Though Microsoft hasn’t made any announcements about sales figures, sharp price drops this early on usually mean a phone’s not selling well.
The Data Plans Are Too Steep
The phones themselves were actually attractively priced already; it’s the data plans that are the problem. Wenoted that when they first launched. Both Kin phones require smartphone-like data plans that put the minimum cost of ownership at nearly $70 per month — at least if you want to use those cool social features that the Kin brand is all about.
Once you’re paying that much for service, you might as well get a full-on smartphone like an iPhone
orAndroid
. You could even wait a few months and get a device running Microsoft’s own, more robust Windows Phone 7
.
What do you think? Will these price drops help the Kin phones sell better despite their expensive data plans? Let us know in the comments.
There’s No iPhone 4 Recall, No Matter What Twitter Says
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jun.28, 2010, under Latest Web Technologies, What's Happening?
The Daily Mail reported this morning than an iPhone 4 recall is underway, but don’t believe it; the UK publication’s source was atweet from a fake Steve Jobs Twitter account. Apple hasn’t announced any plans to recall its new phone.
The Twitter account @ceoSteveJobs is a parody account — it says so in the profile bio, and even if you don’t read the bio, it should be obvious from the tweets, which include lines like “Be careful not to leave your #iPhone4 at the Genius Bar on the way out of the store. Gizmodo might pick it up,” and “I heard the CEO of AT&T got married recently. The service was great but the reception was terrible.”
The Daily Mail has pulled the original story, which began with a claim that a recall was coming and a quote from the fake Twitter account, and then continued to explain the issues users have had with signal loss when the iPhone 4 is held a certain way.
It’s hard to imagine that Apple didn’t know about the signal issue. The engineers at the company probably decided it was a worthwhile trade-off for otherwise improved reception, so don’t expect a recall for that reason.
Though you might be surprised that The Daily Mail ran a story based on a tweet from an account that is so obviously fake, it’s not the first time something like this has happened. That’s why Twitter implemented a system for verifying the accounts of important people and publications.

