• New devices go on sale in the US through Verizon Wireless
• Vodafone will begin to sell Kin in Europe in the autumn
Microsoft hopes to take on the growing importance of bitter rivals Apple and Google in the mobile phone market with a new range of its own mobile devices that focus on social networking.
Its new "Kin" range of mobile phones have slide-out qwerty keyboards – with the smaller device bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Palm Pre – and will be arriving in the US within weeks. British mobile phone users, however, will have to wait until the autumn when the Kin devices will be available on the Vodafone network.
Microsoft has been in the mobile phone market for almost a decade but has consistently failed to grab anything like the market share it has enjoyed in the PC world. Its share of the US smartphone market dropped to 15.1% in February from 19.1% in November, while Google's Android platform has 9%, up from 3.8%, and Apple maintained its quarter share of the market, according to figures from Comscore.
With analysts convinced that the next generation of web users will most likely be accessing the internet on a mobile device rather than a desktop computer it has become increasingly crucial to Microsoft that it improve its mobile offering.
The new devices are a result of a project within Microsoft known as Pink and have been developed alongside the seventh version of Microsoft's mobile phone software. Windows Phone Series 7 was announced back in February and several mobile phone manufacturers are already working on devices that use the new software.
But Microsoft finally seems to have learned that just developing good software does not lead to a winning mobile phone.
Apple has complete control over the iPhone, while even Google has decided in recent months that it needs more of a say in how the open standards mobile phone platform it has championed – called Android – is implemented.
Earlier this year Google launched its own phone, the Nexus One. It is manufactured by HTC but Google has controlled exactly how the device looks and works.
In a similar manner, the Kin devices are manufactured by Sharp but Microsoft has control over the software, online services and hardware. The phones are designed to make it easy for users to access Microsoft's online services – including search engine Bing – as well as publish and share information with their contacts.
Read More at : http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/12/microsoft-mobile-phone-kin
Posts
