Formerly known as Project Pink, analysts estimate that if the Kin smartphones attract even a fraction of the demographic heavily into social networking services like Facebook, they have the potential to eclipse sales of Windows Phone 7 Series, the upcoming smartphone operating system that Microsoft is counting on to regain market share from competition such as Google Android and the Apple iPhone OS.
The Kin One, with a sliding form factor reminiscent of the Palm Pre, features both a physical QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen, as well as a 5.0-megapixel camera with flash capable of shooting SD video. The Kin Two also has a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen, along with an 8.0-megapixel camera and stereo speakers. Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, said during an April 12 presentation in San Francisco that the phones’ target demographic was “the sharing generation” for whom “social life is their priority No. 1.”
Microsoft’s upcoming Kin One and Kin Two smartphones, aimed at a younger demographic, could benefit from the rising popularity of social networking; moreover, the phones’ success or failure could serve as a barometer for the fortunes of Windows Phone 7, the smartphone franchise that Microsoft plans on launching near the end of 2010.
Microsoft may have found an appropriate approach. Several statistics companies, including Nielsen, have spent the past several quarters tracking the rise in social-networking usage. That increase has been affecting a wide variety of IT businesses in their approach to building software; during an April 8 presentation in New York, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff displayed a graph showing the number of social-networking users surpassing e-mail users, data that he said justified the creation of the Facebook-like Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform. That same logic is obviously influencing smartphone operating system design, as well.
Microsoft is betting that its upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series will also help reverse this market trend. Windows Phone 7, in a departure from the operating system model of the Apple iPhone and Google Android, aggregates Web content and mobile applications into “Hubs” delineated by subject category, such as “People” or “Games.” While Microsoft executives have mentioned on several occasions that Windows Phone 7 will roll out with a suitable massive marketing campaign, the Kin smartphones have a role to play in the company’s mobile shift.
“I would argue that Kin may be the more important product of the two OS offerings,” Jack Gold, principal analyst of J. Gold Associates, wrote in an April 13 research note. “Kin is a bigger gamble, whereby Microsoft is trying to define a new market niche. If it catches on, Kin could usher in a new class of ‘Facebook in Your Pocket’ devices, just like iPhone created a class of devices for Internet-centric users.”