Kin One reviewed by a 13 year old

Hello MobilityMinded Community,

I am Matthijs van Mierlo (13), Johan van Mierlo’s son. I have been testing multiple devices over the years such as the Asus Eee Pc, and the LG Expo and gave my dad some feedback on what exactly I thought on the devices. This article is going to compare my beloved LG Expo, and the Microsoft KIN One which is new on the mobile market with Verizon.

First impressions on the KIN One:

Pros: The KIN One is a great social networking device that is aimed towards teens and young adults. The KIN One has a very easy to use interface, with three different screens that you can slide between with just a flick of a finger. On the first screen there are shortcuts to your personal email, web-browser, and RSS Feeds. This is ideal for the busy student who wants easy access to their personal web-apps. The second screen is dedicated totally to social networking applications such as Facebook, and Twitter, making it very convenient to update your status quickly, and also to reply to Facebook status updates. I don’t use twitter so I really didn’t use this at all. But the Facebook app is great.

Since the KIN One is a messaging oriented phone, it has a slide out key-board with a nice raised surface for easy texting and typing.  Because of this feature, this makes the KIN One very attractive to teens and young adults since they tend to move towards messaging oriented phones over time, with slide out keyboards and touchscreens.

Also, the KIN One has a very nice touchscreen with multi-touch. You can very easily zoom in and out of pictures and even webpages. The touchscreen for me took a little bit of getting used to.

Cons: The KIN One doesn’t have a calendar!!  This is a very big drawback for those who like to keep track of what is going on. I for example have a lot of weekly events and homework assignments, and keeping track of them is hard to do with the KIN One. In this way the LG Expo is more attractive than the KIN One.

Also, a minor drawback to the KIN One is that the internet is not nearly as fast as the internet on my LG Expo. When going to a commonly used website such as www.accuweather.com to check the weather, it gets a bit frustrating at some times when you’re waiting for 2 minutes or so until it fully loads on the KIN1, when on the LG Expo I it loads in a matter of seconds.

Unlike the LG Expo, you are not able to get any more apps then there already are on the LG Expo. Using www.accuweather.com as an example again, you need to actually go to the web-address on the KIN One web-browser in order to find your weather, when on my LG Expo, you could easily use Windows Marketplace to find multiple apps for weather. The only apps for the KIN One are the ones that you see when you start it up (CONTACTS, RSS FEED, WEB BROWSING, etc.)

Conclusion

Overall, I do think that the KIN One is a very attractive device for teenagers because of its social networking potential, and because of its stylish look, very small and rounded with a slide out keyboard. However, the calendar and a fast browsing experience needs to be added.

Next I will be looking at the KIN Studio.

About Matthijs

Matthijs has been using mobile devices since his Dad had many of these around to play with. For 2 years he has a Windows Phone. The Phones he has used are the HTC S710, Motorola Q9h, Samsung Omnia, Samsung Propel Pro, Pantech Matrix Pro, LG Expo  He also has an iTouch, PSP, HP Tablet PC, XBOX 360 and an iPad