Kin Twom Verizon and Microsoft are missing a great opportunity

Question

To my mind the Kin Twom is a great feature phone with only two problems that really need correcting.  First and foremost contacts need to be able to be saved away from the phone.   Kin Studio needs to opened up to the latest Kin phones and not shut down at the end of January.  Zune software needs to be modified to save contact information.  Verizon needs to make My backup assistant work on the Kin phones.  One of these things needs to happen in case your Kin is lost, stolen, etc. and to make moving to a new phone in the future easier.
The second problem with the Kin phone is the inability to organize contacts into some kind of groups.  If you have the capability to store 1000 contacts in the phone, you need some way to organize them.  Feature phones far less capable than the Kin already have this.  How hard can it be to program this feature in.
I recently went looking for a touch phone that I could use without a data plan.  It came down to the Pantech Crux, LG Cosmos Touch and the Kin Twom.  The Kin Twom was the obvious choice for me.  Where else can you get a feature phone with Wifi, touch screen and an 8 megapixel camera with flash and zoom, and music player?
Sure the interface takes some getting used to.  But it is miles better than most of the Verizon feature phones.  Those interfaces have not changed in years.  The Kin is a windows interface (not quite Windows phone 7, but still good).  People should stop comparing it to a smart phone.  That's not what it is.  It lies somewhere between a feature phone and a smart phone.
I also liked the original Kin phones with the social networking features.  Some of these features were really unique.  I read all the reviews that said the phones failed because the data plan was too expensive.  That's not the phone's fault, it is the fault of Verizon marketing.  A social networking phone with the ability to save photos and contacts info up in the cloud was really unique in the feature phone market.  Both Verizon and Microsoft have really screwed this up.  They have a product that could truly impact the feature phone market for years.  Frankly there a lot of people who don't want/need a smart phone.  Instead those of us with Kins are having the come up with workarounds for the contact problems and watching the unique features of the phone being stripped out by Verizon/Microsoft.  Sad

Answer 1

What everyone said here is right on the money. Simple fixes, none of these are new to phone technology, nor are they absent from any other feature phone, but they would do wonders for the Kin phones. Like  technobody said, the exact 3 phones were in my considerations, and for the exact same reasons, i didn't even hesitate to snatch up the Kin Twom. There are so many things you did right about this phone, the actual phone is a gem. It just has a few issues to be addressed.
For me, it boils down to 4 or 5 major issues that weren't addressed either in the beginning, or during the original to M model transition, that if they were fixed, 90% of its problems would be fixed:
contact transfer/backup (backup assist is verizon's own program, but because of the original loop, wasn't needed for this phone, and when re-writing this phone's software for feature phone release, somehow this slipped through quality control/testing)
volume keys locking upon phone lock
groups for contacts: ability to make and select contact groups, especially for mass texts, or easy access to contacts when the contact list gets very large and bothersome to scroll through. also to be able to select both the entire group, or go through and add 1-by-1 contacts from within the group (in other words, not exiting the select 'menu' until it is user-commanded to do so)
Messaging: ability to select individual messages and manage them, such as delete, forward, resend, view details, etc, as well as ability to select emails from contacts when adding to a sender. Additionally, being able to send quick-texts (user-saved, like in other feature phones), and having the keypad on the touchscreen appear as a slide-up/down functionality (think, cosmos touch design), so you can at least type when the phone is closed, for quick replies (w/ added predicative text). Afterall, the Kins were designed as messaging phones..so how does it not have predicative text (T9, iTap, etc), and not have any ability to text with the phone closed?
ringtone rename/deletion/organization into default groups of melodies/alerts/alarms, as well as a vibrate only setting for sounds (along with fixing the alarms to vibrate when phone is set to vibrate)