I have had this phone for a few months now and the reasons I hate this phone continue to add up.
1. Backup Assistant is not compatible with it - wonderful, I still haven't entered all of my contacts.
2. The KIN website has been inaccessible to me since I got it. This means that I can not sync the phone with my computer.
3. I can't get the videos I've taken off of the phone.
4. The design of the edges of the phone are ridiculous. Why make the edge slanted so that you are constantly losing grip on the thing. It takes two hands for me to open it. ( I should have realized this one in the store...)
5. The phone doesn't return to the home screen after you send a message. I'm constantly having to back out of screens.
6. The main button on the front of the phone that seems to back you out of everything, doesn't hang up your call. So you have to touch the end call on the screen.
7. This phone should NOT be used while driving since it is necessary to look at the screen to do anything. (and because it takes two hands to even open!)
8. (This one is recent) I realized I had not been getting text messages for 10 days. I restart the phone to find I had missed 18 messages, some of them important.
9. I don't trust using the wifi option, knowing that so many people have been charged big bucks. It doesn't matter anyway, because the functionality when synced with the computer are next to nothing.
10. Lag time during texting can be a real pain.
Here is my biggest issue of them all. I take this excerpt from wikipedia...I have nothing to compare the validity to... but this is the attitude I've seen from everywhere...
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Kin suffered from poor sales. Microsoft executives told The New York Times that they were dismayed that Verizon Wireless staff were not promoting the phones actively enough. After only forty-eight days on the market, Microsoft discontinued the Kin line on June 30, 2010. Its planned European release on UK carrier Vodafone was canceled.
“The Kin was a mistake from Day One,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst of Enderle Group, told eWeek magazine. “The extra time they took to convert the Kin from the Sidekick platform to Windows CE made it about a year-and-a-half late to market, and the merger likely added another year-and-a-half. That’s 1.5 to 3 years late depending on when you start the clock.”
Also, software features such as the Kin Loop, Kin Spot, Kin Studio, and certain social networking integration has been removed. For the newer "m" phones, there is a way to "downgrade" the firmware to the original version. This can be done by holding "r", "b", and "power" upon turning on the device. The Kin website was discontinued on January 2011, and all user pictures and other information stored on the website were deleted. Verizon is offering a free trade-in to all affected phone owners, offering a 3G smartphone in return. It is unclear whether they will upgrade the original phones to the "m" version.
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My question to Verizon is how do I get a 3G smartphone trade in?? I've been a loyal customer for years, but I'm dissatisified about the integrity surrounding this phone enough that I've begun shopping to other carriers.
Thank you for your summary. I completely agree and would like to add one more: you cannot text videos that you saved.
have u tried to bluetooth your contacts from ur old phone? or go to a verizon store for them to transfer the numbers over for you.... the phone is complicated... there is some shortcut keys on the keyboard to end ur calls... try to clear out the memory on ur phone like old texts u don't need and things like that... they slow phones down like this... everyday i do a soft reset on my phone by taking the battery out of the back... clear the cache on the browser if u use that and set your email to sync less times... try using the recent icon to go back to a main screen or just tap ur favs before u do anything and u can swipe to the main screen from there.. ur phone might be like mines and get messages late but thats because my phone switches between verizon and nonverizon networks constantly which delays messsages and missed calls and vmails... i was reading something about the kin stuff is online is being done away with
Should you really have to do a "soft reset" of your phone daily? I would think this is unacceptable in todays day and age...
I would like to add to this post that last night I had the phone on the charger overnight only to realize half way through today that my wife could not reach me.....because the phone was completely dead. Wonderful...
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