Kin / MOTOBLUR / WebOS [The Competitors]

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced the Kin One and Kin Two, a duo of new mobile handsets with a social-networking focus. With hardware from Sharp and a custom OS based on Windows Phone 7, it's Microsoft's attempt to reinvent the featurephone.

With no support for third-party applications, it's got a homescreen that shows Facebook and Twitter status updates from your friend, a Zune interface for your music and videos, a Web browser and a camera for shooting HD video... and that's about it! This is just the latest in a line of social mobile operating systems - Motorola's MOTOBLUR, a custom skin for Android, provides similar functions, whereas Palm's WebOS has a feature called Synergy, which automatically syncs your Facebook friendlist with the contact list on your phone. Apple's deliberately steered clear of integrating social media in its software, letting third-party apps do the job instead. Does a phone built for social media from the ground up sound more enticing than the promise that "there's an app for that"?

Thing is, MOTOBLUR and Synergy both have a major flaw, which can be approximately described this way: they're not intelligent enough. That is, while Facebook monitors your behavior on the site and adapts certain features (like the News Feed) to reflect the activities of the friends you interact with most, these mobile operating systems aren't nearly as discerning. Your best friends, kids you haven't talked to since high school, former teachers, co-workers, ex-girlfriends. All of them get imported into your WebOS contact list via Synergy, and all of them get displayed with equal preference in MOTOBLUR's homescreen widgets. Nowadays, we're constantly connected to one global Internet, but we browse it in a thousand different contexts, whether through our phones or our personal laptops or a terminal in the public library. It might make sense in theory to integrate these contexts to eliminate redundant information, but we haven't quite yet figured out a way to painlessly separate, say, our work from our personal life, or the friends from 20 years ago versus the ones we keep in contact with today.

I'm going to withhold judgment until the phones are actually released, but Kin seems to fix that problem. Its home screen, dubbed "The Loop", lets you set the updates you see on it based on the friends you care about the most. Still, I think I prefer the iPhone/standard Android model, where you pick the social functionality you want to enable by installing third-party apps rather than have it built-in to the device. By picking which apps to install on your phone, you can pick which context you want to use it in—whether that's for work, for fun,  or a combination of both. To me, that's still better than having the manufacturer decide that for you out-of-the-box.