Microsoft announced the Kin One and Kin Two yesterday, geared squarely towards “sociologists“. The home screen (“Loop”) on both devices were littered with an array of updates from a variety of social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, but what was conveniently left out of the announcement was that the information there would be at least 15 minutes old if left to refresh automatically. For the young, freewheeling hipsters that the Kin devices are targeting, that may be well too long to be useful, but for the truly dedicated, you can always manually update to get the latest.
The decision for the 15 minute refresh interval was clearly to keep network demands low, but an engineer also said that social network APIs were “immature”. It’s times like this that I can really appreciate the immediacy and efficiency of RIM’s push technology – it’s just a shame they can’t squeeze out something as fresh and marketable as the Kin.
[via Engadget]