Previously I told you how great my wife’s KIN Two is.
Then its web browser started causing the phone to go comatose on any web page, from the simple (Facebook mobile pages) to the unfortunately still quite simple (weather pages.) It was unresponsive to the point that the only recourse was battery removal. Even after doing that things weren’t clearing up. Clearly it was unhealthy. Maybe this is something that happens to any KIN with the current software after a few weeks, or maybe it’s a perfect storm sort of thing… but either way, the KIN was NOT being very great.
So I took a chance that normally gets men barbequed. I had Coral go to Settings > About your phone > Erase phone data. Most phones have a “forget everything” option like this, and on the KIN’s smartphone breatheren, it comes with a bunch of follow-up work to make the phone “right” again. I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea.
Not so with the KIN. She entered her Windows Live ID and after some time syncing with the KIN service the phone was exactly as it was before: all contacts, all emails, all Facebook updates, all feeds, all photos & videos taken. It came back pretty much as it was, except without the bad memories that led to the browser trouble.
Notable things that did not get synced up:
- Keep favorite websites she’d pinned as “apps”
- Keep music synced from our home PC
Sure, phones should be perfect, never act up, and all sorts of unreasonable things. But when they aren’t, don’t, or can’t, a sync service like KIN’s is a pretty nice parachute.
With Verizon’s excellent service & the right discounts in play it made sense to go with Verizon & Windows Phones when Coral & I finally combined phone services.
We got Coral a KIN Two. It seems to me the reviewers who complain about the price have it backwards. Why would you pay this much to get a smartphone? The KIN gets out of your way, doesn’t via its ecosystem (except for Zune) try to con additional time or money from you, and makes it about the people and the talk and the music. The camera is excellent & the photo sharing is smart & you can actually see what’s on the screen when you’re outside. Yes, it needs a shared & calendar, and Coral thinks it could use a better “favorites” system (I wonder if the KIN Rosa ads are about this?) And oddly the Zune social has some shrinkage, though I get it: I bet adjustments in all these areas are coming quickly, as they are all Windows Live ‘Wave 4′ competancies and don’t really make since for either KIN or Zune to handle just yet. For business use I can see a problem with KIN. But for personal or family use, the KIN is super.
My phone choice was the Omnia II. I thought “I’ll get a smartphone and develop code which will run on Windows Phone 6.5 or Windows Phone 7 (in all that supposed time I do these sorts of things.)” Samsung + Verizon did a number on this one to-date. The hardware’s impressive but they’ve loaded it with apps which try to take your money (City ID, the phone answer screen), which let you pan senslessly through pictures of surfers (TouchWiz) and which are designed for humans with transparent fingers (Swype keyboard.) I managed to remove most of this junk, and it’s not that bad… it still hits a smartphone functionality mark, the hardware is very nice, & the price is right… but KIN would’ve been kinder to me I think.
Tagged as:
KIN,
Windows Phone
Microsoft recently (April 29th) updated the free Windows Phone Developer Tools to line them up with the release version of Visual Studio 2010. If you have the original version released during MIX ‘10 (March 19th) you must remove it first.
Removing “Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP” is supposed to clean everything up, but when I uninstalled:
the uninstaller failed to install “Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC”.
I noticed “Microsoft Silverlight 4” and “Microsoft Silverlight 4 SDK” were installed more recently than March 19th. Removing that pair got me back on the uninstall path (well, the uninstall was then able to (re)install “Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC”, then uninstalling one more time worked.)
Finally the coup de grâce, the April 2010 Refresh install (download.microsoft.com). If you missed an uninstall, it’ll tell you. I found there were a couple additional things I had to manually uninstall. Both Silverlight 4 packages previously removed will be reinstalled.
Here’s hoping the next update to the Windows Phone app development tools is simpler!
Tagged as:
Windows Phone
