July 2nd, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Smartphones & Tablets | No Comments »
Microsoft has announced that it will abandon further production and development of their KIN devices. KIN devices are the result of the Danger acquisition by Microsoft some years ago.
Danger was a very popular developer of mobile devices under the Sidekick brand. Sidekicks where mainly sold through T-Mobile. The reputation of the Sidekick was burned when Microsoft started to migrate data from Danger’s Linux servers to Windows. A lot of the data was lost and as the Sidekick was a cloud device, consumers ended up with loss of contacts, messages and more.
Microsoft will integrate the KIN team into the Windows Phone 7 unit. This probably means that those who did buy a KIN device will not see any firmware upgrades in the long run. At the same time, developers will probably back away from the platform as ROI will become an issue.
T-Mobile has shown interest to re-introduce the Sidekick brand to the mobile market. It will however apply the brand to Android based mobile phones. T-Mobile officially owns the SideKick brand so there is nothing Microsoft can do about this.
