• halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    Eh. Apps were still fairly new in 2010. It launched around the same time as the iPhone 4. Heck, the iPhone was still officially only available from AT&T at the time.

    It looked like a knockoff iPhone 3G with a slide out keyboard, so it was at least twice the size. Lack of apps and social media weren’t what killed the Kin.

    • twinnie@feddit.uk
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      6 hours ago

      Apps were still kinda new at the time and social media was shit hot. iPhones were still premium products and most people didn’t have one.

      I think a lot of people don’t realise that when the iPhone first came out it didn’t have apps. They eventually released an upgrade so that you could pin webpages to the homepage. I remember Apple arguing that web stuff was so good now you didn’t need apps.

      From what I recall around that time the Kin never really generated that much interest. It wasn’t being aimed as a product to replace the iPhone and was targeted at the kind of people who nowadays would sit on their phone and scroll TikTok. There was a lot of change in those days; social media was still pretty new, useful internet in your phone was pretty new (it’d been around for years but it wasn’t so expensive to this point nobody had used it, iPhone made constant internet connections a thing) touch screens were still new and sexy, and more I forget about. The idea that your phone was this little mobile computer that you carried around wasn’t really there yet and they were still mostly for communicating.