Microsoft's KIN: A Eulogy

KIN Studio

Now for the real cloud data link - KIN Studio. If there's one thing the KIN did that was truly different, it's this kind of totally radical web integration. You're not explicitly told so, but the KIN constantly syncs all text messages, call logs, photos, standard resolution videos, contacts, and other data back up to the Windows Live servers on an automatic sync schedule. You can manually invoke a sync anytime you like, but it takes a while and honestly didn't always seem to force a complete sync. Letting it happen on its own actually produced more consistent results. If your phone isn't completely synced up, you'll be told with a crossed out sync near the time in the status box at the bottom right. I encountered a failed sync only twice, the first time it solved itself on the next sync, and another with an impatient reboot. The rest of my problems hinged on my ill conceived plans to log both phones into the same live account - again, I'm sure nobody ever tried logging both phones into one account.

The KIN studio is silverlight based, which is a minor caveat since access always requires the plugin, but the upside is that the studio presents the exact same UI the KINs do. It's the same style, buttons, and even has the KIN spot for sharing things. You can view photos and videos, messages, contacts, and things from the feed reader through this interface. With the exception of making calls and sending text messages, virtually everything you can do on the phone, you can do here.

That includes editing contacts, publishing photos to Facebook, updating your statuses, whatever. Essentially everything on the phone gets backed up and is visible through the Studio, which itself is pretty impressive.

Think about that for a second - nearly everything you do on the phone gets backed up, synced, and made available on a web interface. It's awesome. Why hasn't anyone done this before? In both messages and photos & videos, you're given a timeline you can scrub along to see relevant information as it happened. For example, what day you took photos, when messages were sent, when you placed calls. It gives you a pseudo snapshot of a given day, week, or month.

It's an interesting notion - accessing your phone from the web - and there's so much about this which is really the way things should be across every smartphone platform. To some extent, you can already hack some of this together using services like Google Sync (which behaves like Exchange to mobile devices) or MobileMe, and then photos and videos using other services, but KIN does an excellent job mashing it all up under one account. It's truly Apple-like in that the Studio works without the frustration of managing a million different services. Throw one live account at it, and you're done - and it doesn't cost extra. The result is that there's no need to sync anything to the desktop, because it's already being done up to the cloud.