Wow, finally. That Kin thing was an interesting experiment, but it seems that Microsoft were the only ones who couldn't see its inevitable failure.

It's sad that the Kin made it through and the Courier did not.

There was a great Engadget podcast a month or two ago, where Josh got into a somewhat heated debate with Engadget's friend, analyst Michael Gartenberg. Gartenberg insisted that the Kin phones would be huge, and catch on like crazy. Josh represented all sane listeners in the argument, and was astonished at the assertion. Looks like as usual the analyst didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

I tell ya, I want to know how to become an analyst. It seems I have to three things in order to do so:
1) predict things that will obviously come true
2) occasionally predict something out of left field
3) every so often predict the iPhone will come to Verizon

Anyway, sorry to get off topic. I celebrate Kin's death. The ONLY thing cool about those phones was that they were the first Zune phones. But that will be meaningless when the Phone 7 phones come out.

I did get hands on with the Kin phones at a Verizon store a few weeks ago. The hardware felt a little clunky, but like something a teen might carry. The screens, however, were pretty bad, with low pixel density and low brightness. In fact, it really seemed like the brightness was turned way down on the Kin 2 I tried, but despite about 5 minutes of fiddling with it, I couldn't for the life of me find a settings menu to change the screen brightness. I had thought these phones were for idiot teenagers, and here I was overly frustrated that I couldn't find a basic user experience setting.

Fail.