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.
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