[makeramen]

I disagree completely.

With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.

Their failure was in capturing market, or more precisely, the lack thereof. There was simply no market for a half-smartphone like the kin, that wasn't really good at being a simple "dumbphone", and not even as "smart" as a last generation iphone which costs about the same.

With the iPhone 3GS going for $99, and a handy selection of decent featurephones available for free depending on carrier sales, anyone with half a brain would know there is no market for something like the kin. At least not now of all times.

[zmmmmm]

> With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.

Always-connected doesn't necessarily mean huge amounts of bandwidth. They could have built this thing as a social media device that was doing simple messaging and heavily restricted / optimized features for photo & video. I think there would be a space in the market for such a thing for teens, but MS clearly badly missed it. And if they have pissed off their carrier partners in the process then it is even worse because they desperately need their support if WP7 is going to be a success.

[stcredzero]

Yes. This should've been marketed as something that kids could buy when their parents refused to buy them an iPhone. Either the device would have to be free or the connectivity. A lot of social features could've been implemented on top of SMS or something else dirt cheap using UDP packets. Make something that can talk to a free featurephone over Bluetooth, so you don't compete with something free. Instead you make something free even better.