Hacker News Reader

To be fair, my first cell phone only displayed one line of text which was only numbers, didn't have a phone book, had terrible call quality, in addition to all the listed missing features. So the Kin is actually a great phone. Should have sold millions.

The iPhone also launched what.. four years ago? At the time, those limitations weren't such a big deal.

That's true. The difference is that the Iphone lacked features because of Steve Jobs' desire to only do something if you can do it perfectly. The Kin lacked features because of politics.

This is what will kill Microsoft.

I'm not sure Steve's desire of perfection was the reason for all lacking features. MMS comes to mind. Ditto for being able to send an SMS to multiple people. Common features of phones, no magical implementation by Apple, but not supported originally (hell, it took iOS 4 for you to know how many characters your SMS contains).

Does iOS 4 tell you how many characters your SMS contains? Mine doesn't.

You need to turn it on in Settings, since it's off by default.

It does but this is off by default. You can turn it on in Settings->Messages->Charcter count. When on character count is displayed over "Send" button when your input takes more than one line—interesting quirk. On the other hand it correctly switches to 70 available chars instead of 160 if I enter a char not in 7-bit GSM character set.

If you're gonna compete, you'll have to compete with the iPhone4 not 2007's iPhone. That said, I don't know if all these statements are true, but some would be quite dealbreaking for me.

If you think the Kin was meant to compete with any iPhone, let alone iPhone 4, you've missed a couple of memos.

That's part of the problem, it wasn't significantly cheaper, the majority cost is the cost of the plan. When you can buy an iPhone 3GS or a Droid incredible for a mere 10% bump in cost over the standard 2 yr plan it makes absolutely no sense to buy a Kin, which is why nobody did.

If your feature-wise competition is at a price point you can't even touch, then you made a huge mistake. If your price-comparable competition is at a featureset you can't even touch, then you made an even bigger mistake.

> If you're gonna compete, you'll have to compete with the iPhone4 not 2007's iPhone.

And if you really want to compete, you need to target iPhone 5, not 4.

> "The iPhone was based on Windows CE"

False

> "iPhone only supports email attachments, and does not support attachments to other media (like MMS)"

True for a year (2 years with AT&T)

> "The handset does not store photos or videos. Instead, every photo and video taken on the iPhone is uploaded to Microsoft's server"

False

> "There is no photo editing software for the 2007 iPhone."

Was only true for a year

> "iPhone does not currently support playing video from sites such as YouTube or Hulu"

False, iPhone always supported YouTube; Hulu is a special case due to DRM & their chosen technology stack and politics

> "iPhone has no app store and no 3rd party apps can be installed on iPhone."

Was only true for a year — but from the get-go, the iPhone supported rich mobile Web apps, even allowing them to be installed to the home screen

> "the iPhone web browser does not support Flash web applications, and there are no games for the 2007 iPhone."

True and false (though no non-web-stack games were possible for a year)

> "iPhone has no calendar or appointment application, nor any ability to sync with Outlook calendar or Google Calendar"

False

> "iPhone is unable to Instant Message (IM), or use any IM client"

False if you include browser-based chat (or AIM thru SMS)

> "There is no spelling correction or predictive text input on the iPhone."

False since day 1

> "There are no MicroSD or memory expansion slots."

True, though it offered gigabytes of storage, much more than (at list virtually) any other phone in 2007

> "iPhone will not sync or transfer contact lists from some non-Microsoft services (eg Gmail and Yahoo! Mail)"

False, you could easily import, and often sync, any contacts that you could possibly export as CSV or vCard (through Address Book or Outlook)

"Almost all" is a bit of a stretch, teaspoon; I count just under 50%.

seriously? "only true for a year" = iPhone didn't launch with it, therefore, same as Kin.

Do you know what browser the Kin has? It doesn't seem unlikely that the Kin would support web apps.

Yes please compare apples to apples. Claiming that iPhone did not support something for only a year is BS because thats how it launched. what about multi-tasking? Oh iPhone didn't support that for a couple of years only.

GRANTED that iPhone is first-to-market and actually created the market, so they get the brownie points because there was nothing even close available. Now if you want to compete with the iPhone to any extent you MUST compete with the iPhone of today, not the iPhone of 1G.